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

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

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

Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war by the sneering Norman Angell). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing (Russian biased) "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a complex SLBM and ICBM threat that we must disarm now, while also claiming that their tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat! In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with any more evidence than Brezhnev's word, it appeared) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover thousands of miles radii). Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda would turn into a "Reds under beds" argument, designed to imply that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by conventional weapons), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, January 22, 2018

The January 1955 secret Fallout symposium of the AFSWP. LAST UPDATED 3 August 2018 with Opennet's declassified An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons Primary Physics, a declassified neutron bomb report LA-9004, evidence from a Russian dissident for Putin's Novichok nerve gas, CND leader Corbyn racial hatred of Jews in news, and latest August 2018 Novichok nerve agent poisoning news

Thank you to Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive, Mission Support and Test Services (MSTS), Contractor for the Nevada National Security Site of Uncle Sam, for today emailing me a scan in two parts of the terrific (formerly) secret January 1955 AFSWP Fall-Out Symposium, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons project report AFSWP-895, which I've put on internet archive (link is here).  This is the first major analysis (566 pages in its declassified form) of data from Operation Castle on fallout, the first major fallout hazard experience to be documented in great detail in 1954! The report was listed but a PDF was not previously available on the U.S. Department of Energy Opennet site (which currently highlights Edward Teller's dismissal of secrecy delusions in the PDF linked here).  Secrecy is damaging, as mentioned in the previous post on this blog, because it keeps the public uninformed of the key technical arguments that underpin scientific controversies, allowing abusive propaganda from bigoted, ranting communist lunatics to become "mainstream dogma", accepted by deluded, elitist pseudo-socialists as occurred after Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton used "authority" to push eugenics pseudo-science with a pipe dream camouflage of utopia.

AFSWP895: January 1955 Fallout Symposium, secret, front cover.

AFSWP 895: fallout dose rates at 1 hour after the 14.8 megatons surface burst Castle Bravo across Bikini Atoll, 1 March 1954.  BEWARE OF THE MAP SCALE LABELLED "NAUTICAL MILES": this map and others in the series, reproduced in the 1956 weapon test report WT-915 and then in the fallout patterns compendium DASA-1251, exaggerates the size of Bikini Atoll considerably - by a factor of about 1.5 (the East-West length of Bikini Atoll is about 33 nautical miles on the graph above, as contrasted to a reality of just 22 nautical miles (see the accurate Holmes and Narver "Completion Report Operation Redwing" map below) - and needs correction (as we have pointed out in previous posts concerning DASA-1251 and WT-915).  A good scan of an original printing of WT-915 is located here.
Bikini Atoll map with accurate scale in Nautical Miles: the East-West length is about 22 nautical miles, as contrasted to the inaccurate USNRDL map scales which give a width of about 33 nautical miles, 50% too much!  (Thus, fallout areas in Bikini Atoll are exaggerated by 1.5 squared, a factor of 2.25.)  The inaccurate maps were proliferated in other fallout reports that "compiled" inaccurate data together without checking the scales (e.g., DASA-1251, the fallout patterns compendium).  As we reported in an earlier post, this had disastrous consequences for one computer prediction method, which was sold on the basis that it reliably reproduced the false Castle-3 shot pattern (the version with the inaccurate distance scale, leading to more than a doubling of areas). 


AFSWP 895: fallout outdoor unshielded dose rates and doses after 14.8 megaton Castle Bravo across Bikini Atoll (ground zero is the reef to the immediate West of "Charlie" Island).  Upper number is dose rate, lower is accumulated dose from fallout arrival time to infinity, outdoors and without any shielding such as buildings or other shelter.


AFSWP 895 fractionation of Sr89 and Ce144 as function of fallout particle diameter in Operation Castle shot Bravo.  Compare to the fractionation data from the 1956 Redwing tests, compiled by Dr Carl F. Miller in USNRDL466.

The report also contains new photos of the fireball and cloud from the 13.5 megaton Yankee shot of Operation Castle, taken from an RB-36, including the times of each photo (which is very useful, because it shows you the evolution of the fireball into the mushroom), at pages 91-110.  On pages 110-121 there is an excellent summary of the fallout study results of the Nevada 1.2 kiloton surface burst and shallow subsurface (earth penetrator warhead simulation) bursts Sugar and Uncle, respectively, from 1951, including photos of the differences in the nature of the fallout, comparing this data to photos of fallout from the 1952 Ivy-Mike surface burst of 10.4 megatons at Eniwetok Atoll.

On pages 123-138 there is a nice paper by Dr Carl F. Miller, called "Physical and Chemical Nature of the Contaminant: Interpretation of Castle Observations", giving the fallout deposited mass per unit area for specific unit-time radiation dose rates, the averaged gamma ray energy, graphs of decay rates, and a detailed table of fallout solubility (ionic fraction of radioactivity when the fallout is mixed with water), comparing land and surface tests of Operation Castle.

(Compare this fallout solubility data to the later USNRDL reports WT-917 and WT-918.  Note that 1958 Hardtack tests report WT-1625 on page 13 briefly interprets and summarises the solubility data from Castle in WT-917 and from Redwing in WT-1317 (the WT-1317 pdf file held on the Opennet database is corrupted and will not open, but we uploaded the full WT-1317 report to internet archive, linked here, before this occurred): the land surface bursts of Castle gave 5% fallout solubility, compared to 58-73% solubility for the water surface barge bursts, whereas the Redwing effective land bursts Zuni and Tewa gave 5-25% and 8-18% solubility, respectively, using rainwater and sea water. (These percentages don't apply to individual nuclides, since the soluble fraction mainly consists volatile decay chain nuclides like I, Sr, Cs, etc., which coat the outer surfaces of fallout particles; whereas the insoluble activity is mainly refractory nuclides that condense in the inside of molten particles, like Zr, Mo, U, Pu, etc. The overall percentage of solubility is therefore the average solubility of gamma emitters, which varies with time as the fallout mixture decays, and the relative percentage of activity coming from soluble nuclides rather than insoluble nuclides, evolves.)

On pages 139-153 there is an interesting paper by Dr Chris S. Cook, called "Radiological Nature of the Contaminant: Source Gamma Energy Spectra", giving data on the fallout gamma ray spectra determined using a sodium iodide scintillation crystal and a photomultiplier tube (the scintillation or flash brightness is proportional to the energy of the gamma ray, so with a pulse height discriminator circuit you can determine the spectrum).  This is vital because the penetrating power of the gamma rays from fallout determines the protective factor of a fallout shelter, and the production of low energy gamma emitters in fallout, particularly neptunium-239 and uranium-237 (produced by the capture of a high energy neutron, above about 1 MeV, by U-238, followed by the ejection of two neutrons, i.e. a so-called n,2n reaction) reduces the danger in the fallout sheltering period of 1-14 days after a dirty bomb (with a uranium jacket on the fusion stage).  Cook reports on page 139:

"Prior to 10 days following the detonation, a large fraction of the radiations are concentrated in the vicinity of 100 kev [0.1 Mev]".

This approximately 0.1 Mev radiation is the neutron activated U-237 and Np-239 (the time of peak percentage contribution of a nuclide to T^{1.2} fallout decay is equal to the half life multiplied by 1.2/ln 2 which is a multiplication factor of 1.44).  The best data available from Castle on this was from Union, shot 4, a water surface burst.  However, excellent gamma spectrum data was obtained from land surface burst Zuni in 1956, reported in WT-1317 and related papers like USNRDL-TR-146, Spectrometric Analysis of Gamma Radiation from Fallout from Operation Redwing, which was discussed on page 19 of our Nuclear Weapons - Collateral Damage Exaggerations report.  Miller gives an excellent compilation of neutron capture to fission ratios for nuclear tests up to 1960 in tables 4 and 6 of USNRDL466, although the numbers are deleted from that table in the declassified document, so you have to instead fill in the table spaces by calculating the capture atom/fission ratios using the ratios of the dose rates in gives in table 11; for example Jangle S gave 0.106/0.1799 = 0.59 atom of U-239 per fission.  Although Navajo and Flathead are deleted from that table, the capture atoms to fission ratios are reported for those shots in other reports, when you look carefully. One piece of data is given by the declassified WT-1317 e.g. the data in Table 3.14 on page 65 states that Flathead produced 0.41 atoms of Np-239 per fission, and more data is in the declassified NV0110837.  The U239 and Np239 capture-to-fission ratios of Redwing thermonuclear weapons 3.8Mt 50% fission Cherokee, 3.53 Mt 15% fission Zuni, and 4.5 Mt 5% Navajo are reported respectively to to be 0.500, 0.427 and 0.125 respectively, on page 12 of WT-1315, shown below:



There is earlier Upshot-Knothole nuclear test fallout data on average gamma ray energy in WT-814, based on the measurement of the attenuation of gamma rays by shields of varying thickness, rather than by gamma spectrometry (the electronics needed to discriminate energy intervals from sodium iodine crystal scintillation photomultiplier pulse heights were being developed in the early 1950s).

AFSWP 895: fractionation of Sr89 Ba140 and Mo99 as function of fallout particle diameter in Operation Castle.  Note that Mo-99 is normally unfractionated since it is refractory (has a high melting point), whereas the gaseous precursors in the decay chains of strontium and barium make them effectively volatile, so they don't condense very effectively on fast-falling particles of early fallout.  This graph gives data from samples collected at 18.5 statute miles from ground zero (97,730 feet).  (There is a history of fractionation data collection at nuclear tests on pages 17-19 of Hardtack report WT-1625, other versions of which - with slightly different data deleted in delassification - are located here and here.)

AFSWP 895: measured percentage of fallout radioactivity deposited within 24 hours as a function of scaled nuclear burst altitude. The scaling procedure is to divide the actual height of burst into the cube-root of the weapon yield (i.e. 10 for 1000 kilotons).

AFSWP 895: speed of rotation of radioactive torus or toroidal circulation inside rising fireball from a 30 kiloton nuclear weapon at 1 minute, taken from Dr Kellogg's presentation (he gave an unclassified version, omitting this data on the measured speeds in the vortex, to the unclassified May 1957 congressional hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man).
AFSWP 895: Dr Kellogg's illustration showing why the cloud top heights were inaccurately measured and reported in early H-bomb tests like Mike, whose height was originally wrongly reported as 25 miles not 20 miles, due to horizontal projections from the edge being confused for the top of the cloud.

AFSWP 895: fallout from 1953 Nevada nuclear test Badger of Operation Upshot Knothole showing paths of fallout at different altitudes in the mushroom cloud: because the winds have different speeds and directions at different altitudes, there the cloud separates accordingly and fallout is distributed over a larger area than would be the case without this wind shear.  This diffusion of fallout spreads the same total amount of radioactivity over a greater area, reducing doses and dose rates to lower levels than simplistic predictions (the classic cigar shaped fallout pattern) indicate.
AFSWP 895: fallout distribution in the mushroom head and in the stem of the cloud as used in the US Army Signal Corps fallout prediction method.  Note that 90% is assumed to be in the mushroom head, and that 10% is in the stem (at lower altitudes), but the average size of the particles in the stem are larger than those in the mushroom head.  This type of analysis, based on trying to reconcile theory with observed fallout data, is the source of the statement about the assumed distribution in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
AFSWP 895: one effort (by Lt Col Lulejian) to reconstruct the fallout distribution across Rongelap Atoll in the 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 based on wind data analysis.  This is controversial and possibly very unreliable due to the inclusion of Eniwetok Atoll data (200 miles to the West of Bikini, i.e. 200 miles upwind!).  However, it shows that efforts were being made to try to determine the whole fallout pattern for the January 1955 Fall-Out Symposium.
AFSWP 895: Lulejian's effort to model fallout distribution doses to 48 hours across Rongelap Atoll in the 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 based on wind data analysis, combined with radiation measurements made on atoll islands.   The only Castle test where the entire fallout pattern was measured was 13.5 megaton Yankee, using ships and aircraft to survey the ocean and then to correct the measurements for the large protective factor of the water (when the fallout hits the water, most of the activity, whether soluble or in micron sized insoluble metallic particles within the relatively large calcium hydroxide flakes, ends up dispersed within the 100 metre thick surface water above the thermocline, attenuating the surface dose rate to something on the order of 500-1000 times less than the dose rate you get when the same amount of fallout is deposited on a land surface).  1956 Redwing nuclear tests showed that water surface bursts like Yankee in the 80% humidity air of Bikini atoll produce similar local fallout distributions to land surface bursts, and Yankee probably gave a very similar fallout distribution to Bravo's shot time wind fallout pattern.  This is similar to RAND Corporation's analysis of the Bravo fallout.  AFSWP 895 also gives Schuert's elaborate and misleading Bravo fallout reconstruction (later reprinted in USNRDL report WT-915), which puts too much activity in the highest dose rate contours, violating the area versus dose rate plots given by four land and water shots in Redwing, when scaled to 1 fission megaton (see WT-1316, Figure 2.45).  (Also, see Kelloggs testimony on page 105 of the 1957 congressional hearing Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, where Kellogg notes that the percentages of local fallout for land and water surface bursts in Redwing were actually very similar, and an earlier analysis to the contrary ignored Na-24 and use the wrong conversion factor between dose rate and activity; unfortunately the corrected data was ignored and the earlier mistaken analysis is quoted by Glasstone and Dolan 1977, and is also quoted by Chuck Hansen in his 1988 book US Nuclear Weapons.  To summarise, the initial analysis of the Flathead and Navajo water surface burst tests of Redwing indicated only about 30% of activity down in 24 hours, but the reanalysis by B. L. Tucker of RAND Corp, allowing for Na-24 and the correct dose rate to fissions conversion factor, gave 65-70%, which is within the error limits on land burst data.  The actual percentage refers to effective gamma dose rates not specific nuclides; refractory nuclides are concentrated on large particles which arrive in local fallout, while volatile nuclides that condense at late times on the remaining very small particles in the cloud, mostly come down later on more distant fallout.)  For Yankee's dose rate versus area data, see table here. (This was discussed in previous posts on this blog.)  There is a detailed discussion of the time and space wind data available for the Marshall Islands around the time of the Bravo shot, here.
AFSWP 895: fallout winds analysis by RAND Corporation for the 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 (the USS Curtiss was used as a weather observation ship which sent up balloons, which were tracked by radar to determine the wind pattern as function of altitude over the test site).  (Note that the Figure 6 caption is for Fig 7, shown below, and vice-versa!)

AFSWP 895 fallout in mushroom cloud of the 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. (Note that the Figure 7 caption is for Fig 6, shown above, and vice-versa!)
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer summation fallout prediction method for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis.  This was developed by Stanley Greenfield of RAND Corporation, who states on page 348: "The first problem that was tried on the machine [an IBM 701 computer] was the Castle-Bravo shot", using the shot time winds measured from the USS Curtiss, a ship near Bikini Atoll.  The predicted Bravo fallout pattern is shown below:
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout using shot time winds for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis.  Notice that the fallout is predicted to essentially miss Rongelap Atoll (which is located from roughly 100 nautical miles East to 115 miles ESE, from ground zero).  Hence, there really was a wind shift that contaminated the islanders on the south of Rongelap (and nearby Americans on Rongerik Atoll, just to the east of Rongelap).  Even if the IBM 701 had been available to predict the fallout from Bravo on 1 March 1954, it would not have predicted the danger unless supplemented with a modern weather prediction including the changing wind pattern in the 6-7 hours following the detonation!
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout over Bikini Atoll using shot time winds for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis, comparison of measurements to predictions!
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout doses from a 50 megaton nuclear test as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis.  Note that the 1500 R dose would be reduced to a survivable 37.5 R by a protection factor of 40, the minimal specification for fallout shelters.
AFSWP 895 IBM701 computer prediction of fallout doses from a 1 megaton nuclear test as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis.  This is using the same model which successfully explained Bravo, and shows that with simple fallout shelters, fallout can be survived.
AFSWP 895: example of tabulated outdoor fallout areas for dose rates and accumulated doses from yields of 1 to 50 megatons.  Many different fallout models were compared in AFSWP-895, differences being due to different weighting in the activity distribution in the cloud and as a function of particle size, which affected how much activity came under the influence of winds blowing in different directions at different altitudes.  However, fallout distributions in the clouds were measured in detail in 1956 Redwing tests (using rockets with radiation meters and radio telemetry of data, see weapon test report WT-1315) and detailed particle size distributions (see WT-1317 and USNRDL-TR-314), so such disagreements are now resolved and fallout is very predictable with modern data from the 1956 Redwing series as well as modern weather prediction computer programs that include jet stream trajectory forecasts.  (Naturally, the ground deposited spectrum of fallout particle sizes at any particular location is biased in favor of the particle sizes that have a falling speed which results in their landing at that location, so this data needs to be backtracked to the cloud from a large number of representative locations to see what the overall distribution of particles is initially in the cloud when the toroidal downdraft has stopped operating.  Cloud samples are also biased in the same kind of way, because the largest fallout particles fall out before a sampling aircraft can safely get near the cloud.  Dr Edward C. Freiling's 1970 book Radionuclides in the environment, contains many papers graphically demonstrating this with data from cloud samples for Pacific shots in Castle, Redwing, and various 1962 Nevada surface bursts, such as Johnie Boy and Small Boy.  There is plenty of data, and shots on the differing soil particle size distributions in Nevada and the Pacific all tend to give a similar particle size distribution, closely approximating an inverse fourth power of particle radius, above 1 micron.)

UPDATES: 30 January 2018

Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive has also kindly supplied a PDF of the 1957 RAND Fallout Symposium (which we've uploaded to internet archive here), which contains an application of Anderson's dynamic fallout model to the 1.2 kiloton Sugar nuclear test in Nevada, 1951, to explain particle size distributions by tracking particles from the crater to their maximum height and then fall (rather than the usual false assumption that fallout occurs from a stabilised cloud).  This is listed on the DOE Opennet site but no PDF was previously available.  It also contains Schuert's demonstration that the time and space variation of the downwind wind structure correctly predicts the 3.53 megaton Zuni fallout pattern of Redwing (which is the only one of his four shot analyses which cannot be adequately analysed using merely shot time winds near ground zero; the other shots more easily predicted being Tewa, Flathead and Navajo), and summaries of the fractionation data for I-131 and several other nuclides in the 5.01 megaton harbour type surface burst Tewa at Bikini Atoll in 1956 in table 2 of appendix B:


1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: 5.01 megaton Tewa fallout radionuclide fractionation (depletion factor for volatile precursor decay chains) versus particle size and type for close-in samples from Bikini Atoll.  Note that I-131 is less severely fractionated than Sr-89, that the larger the fallout particles, the greater the depletion, and that spherical shaped particles have more severe fractionation than angular particles.  This is also seen in Tables 2 and 4 of USNRDL-TR-386 (AD232901) for the "Whim" sample of Zuni fallout (the test is identified in WT-1317): melted (spherical or "altered") particles had only 0.018 of the Sr-89 of unfractionated fission products, whereas unaltered (angular) particles has 0.65 and so were almost unfractionated, so they must have picked up the activity which was left behind after the melted particles were formed.  (For general data on Tewa, see the preliminary report of the test linked here.)  Note that the cloud sample data on Redwing fractionation is summarised in WT-1625, table 3.11 on page 47: fractionation was severest for lower altitudes in the cloud, where larger particles resided.  For example, only 0.51 of the expected unfractionated abundance of Sr-90 was observed at 41,000 feet altitude in the Zuni cloud, compared to a factor of 2 (enrichment) at 55,000 feet in the same cloud.  In table 3.2 on page 42 of the same report, for the 1958 Hardtack tests, it is shown that 1.31 megaton land surface burst Koa deposited 98% of its refractory Mo-99 within 24 hours, contrasted to only 64% of its volatile decay chain for Cs-137.  In the 9 megaton Oak surface burst test (effectively a land surface burst since the 15 feet of water above the reef at ground zero was trivial compared to the fireball radius), the corresponding figures were 89% of Mo-99 and 49% of Cs-137 deposited in 24 hours.  Volatile nuclides are concentrated on small, slow-falling particles located high in the cloud.



1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Edward A. Schuert's predictions of the fallout hotlines for the 3.53 megaton Zuni test using different assumptions (shot time winds near ground zero, the space and time variation of the winds in the downwind areas through which fallout actually descends, and even vertical motions), compared to the ocean measured fallout intensities extrapolated to a land surface at 1 hour after detonation.


1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Anderson's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory dynamic fallout model analysis of the largest fallout particles (almost 2 mm in diameter) motions in the 1.2 kiloton Sugar test (Nevada, 1951).  Note that contrary to simplistic fallout models which assume that all fallout begins from the stabilised cloud 5 minutes or so after burst, no 1.95 mm diameter fallout particles remained airborne after 3.5 minutes in this test.  Anderson's model starts with dust being raised by the afterwinds from the crater, rising while that updraft force exceeds gravitation, then falling.  In this way, particles of different sizes rise to different peak altitudes in the cloud (the heaviest remaining mostly in the cloud stem, and the smallest rising higher).  This model thus provides the airborne distribution of particle sizes versus altitudes, and predicts fallout arrival times.


1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Anderson's comparison of predicted accurate fallout distribution (solid line) being deposited 10 minutes after the 1.2 kiloton sugar test, with the inaccurate model prediction based on the false assumption of fallout beginning for all particle at 5 minutes from uniform mushroom distribution (dashed line).  Anderson predicts a smaller average particle size.

Neutron bomb secrets on Opennet: while searching Opennet, I found something else that is vitally important, already available for download as a PDF.  It's Johndale C. Solem's great 1982 Secret Los Alamos report LA-9004 on the neutron bomb, The ultra-low yield antitank weapon, the teeny tiny tacnuke, complete with declassified markings showing it was "Nuclear Weapon Data Sigma 1: Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information", in a limited edition of just 79 printed copies:

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LA-9004 from 1982, secret (now declassified with deletions of design information) states in its abstract (page 3) that: "Estimates of collateral damage indicate that such a device could be used in close proximity to civilian populations with minimal hazard."

LA-9004 then describes the kiloton W79 neutron warhead (44 cm long, 200 lbs including firing system, capable of being fired 32 km from a 8" howitzer), and explains correctly that the whole point of such weapons is to deter the concentrated blitzkrieg assaults that started WWI in 1914 (the invasion of Belgium by concentrated force) and WWII in 1939 (the invasion of Poland by concentrated force).  The principle of concentration of force can be deterred with nuclear weapons, thus preventing the invasions that trigger wars.  By forcing enemies to disperse their forces, any attacks that are made can be dealt with using conventional weapons like handheld anti-tank rockets (no use against concentrated firepower, but useful against dispersed forces), preventing invasion and WWIII:

"Denying an aggressor force the use of massed formations of armor is the single most important aspect of the W79."

LA-9004 then goes on to suggest a lower yield version of the W79 for use against individual tanks, like the Kennedy era portable 0.02 kt W54 that could be fired by individual soldiers, air burst at 15 metres altitude to eliminate local fallout, blast and heat collateral damage.  Page 5:

"Tank crews within 25 m of the weapon would be immediately incapacitated.  Civilian populations 300 m from the point of detonation would be completely safe. ... Beyond 300 m, exposed personnel might be temporarily blinded from looking directly at the detonation, but would suffer no burns to exposed skin. ... The effect of blast on civilian structures near the battlefield would be trivial.  Three hundred metres from the point of detonation windows would rattle but not break. ... the fallout would be expected to be confined to the battlefield itself. ... The principal advantage of such a device in reducing collateral damage from local fallout is that it simply does not produce much in the way of fission fragments or activated weapon debris."

LA-9004 then points out, on pages 7-8, that such a defensive low yield weapon with no significant risk of collateral damage is of no significant use to terrorists, contrasted to easy-to-procure alternatives.

UPDATE (5 February 2018): origins of fallout decay data in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons




Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive has kindly supplied a PDF of the US DOE Opennet document NV0060036, the 15 April 1960 draft revision of the fallout decay activity section in Glasstone book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which was done by T. G. Brough and Dr Carl F. Miller of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, California.  We have placed this PDF on internet archive, here.  The reason for investigating this is that the fallout decay graphs and tables in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan are identical to those in the 1962/4 editions, which differ from the 1957 edition.  Therefore, the current version was developed between 1957-1962, and this chapter revised draft by Brough and Miller from 1960 was clearly influential.  However, it is clear that Glasstone performed extensive additional changes to the 1960 draft before it was published in 1962.

In paragraph 9.6 of the revision, Brough and Miller explain: "the maximum radiation intensity of fallout from megaton detonations occurs at 50 to 75 miles downwind from the explosion centre."

They state in that paragraph that 1 fission megaton of fallout spread uniformly over 10,000 square miles would produce 410 R/hr at 3 feet height, with 10 R/hr of this 410 R/hr being neutron induced activity, and then they clearly explain that this dose rate is reduced in reality by the effect of the "fractionation losses" (i.e. the observed depletion of volatile nuclides from local fallout), which:

"reduce the above mentioned radiation level at 1 hour from a value of 410 to 162 roentgens per hour."

This is far more specific and quantitative than the vague, entirely qualitative discussion of fractionation that made it into the 1962-1977 book!




Above: Brough and Miller's calculated revision to Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons fallout decay rate and accumulated dose graphs, which differ from those actually published in the 1962-77 editions!  Paragraph 9.111 at page 21 of their draft chapter revision also explains clearly than Glasstone's final version, just how the gamma ray energy of fallout varies with time and with the 0.105 MeV low energy contribution to the gamma ray spectrum caused by the neutron induced Np-239 content which is inevitable in dirty weapons with U-238 jackets that capture neutrons, and are not solely fissioned by neutrons (a fact essential for understanding how much shielding is needed to protect yourself against it, bearing in mind that fallout protection factors are calculated using the standard pseudo assumption that the gamma rays are like those from cobalt-60, which emits 1.17 and 1.33 MeV high energy gammas, a mean of 1.25 MeV, way higher than fallout):

"... the weighted mean energy of the gamma rays is about 0.92 Mev/photon at 1 hour after fission.  The mean value decreases with time during the first and second day after fission, and remains between 0.5 and 0.6 Mev/photon up to about 3 weeks after fission ... If the mixture contained neutron induced activities, such as U-239 - Np-239 in large amounts, the mean energy at early times would be much lower."

They even gave a table (Table 9.111 in the draft) showing that the mean energy of fission product gamma rays is 0.61 MeV (less than half the 1.25 MeV Co-60 average) at 24 hours, and 0.52 MeV at 2 days after burst, and remains around 0.5 MeV for the rest of the standard 2 week civil defense fallout sheltering period!  This is without the reduction caused by the very low energy gamma rays from neutron induced Np-239 and U-237.

These facts, deleted from Glasstone's published final version, reflect WT-1317 coauthor Dr Terry Triffet's June 1959 round table conference testimony on page 205 of the US Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, where he explains that this low gamma ray energy in dirty weapons increases the protective factor of shelters far above that usually assumed!

Brough and Miller's draft revision states at page 27 that their decay rates assume 8 MeV neutron fission of U-238, giving at 1 hour after burst 3600 R/hr per fission kiloton yield deposited per square mile, which is reduced to 1480 R/hr by fractionation, to which Np-239 adds 144 R/hr (this is a small percentage contribution at 1 hour, but becomes a much bigger contribution at 96 hours after burst due to differing decay rates of fission products and Np-239 which has a half life of 56 hours).



Update (8 March 2018): double agent Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia nerve agent skin contamination in Salisbury on Sunday 4 March 2018.

Inhalation or ingestion in food of nerve agents produces symptoms too rapidly (i.e. a matter of seconds) for Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia to have walked capably as seen on CCTV video at 3:47 pm on Sunday to a bench where they were found with totally "white eyes" (i.e. the pupils contracted to invisibly small points due to nerve agent) at 4:03 pm.  At 4:15pm police and paramedics arrived and were contaminated, suffering injury.

The victims would have collapsed where they were exposed, with no contamination to others, if poisoned by any nerve agent through ingestion or inhalation at the Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury.  Skin absorption is much slower, since the dead layer of skin (tens of microns thick) slows down the infusion of nerve agent into the blood stream and thence to nerve endings.

Eye pupils contract to invisibly tiny points due to muscle contraction, so that the eyes appear totally white and glazed; a temporary nerve agent effect that lasts until atropine is administered:

"Her eyes were just completely white, they were wide open, but just white and she was frothing at the mouth." - Jamie Paine, eyewitness.

Eyewitnesses Jamie Paine, Freya Church and Graham Mulcock said that Yulia was unconcious, while Sergei had lost his sight, but could still move his arm past his eyes while slumped, facing the sky.

Colonel Skripal of the Russian FSB (Putin's successor to KGB) was British Intelligence MI6's most valuable double agent for ten years, and gave us the details of Russian agents working in the West, for which he was sentenced as a traitor to 13 years in jail by Putin in 2006.  But in 2010, he was traded with the infamous Russian honey trap spy, "Anna Chapman" (aka Anna Kushchyenko, born 1982) and 9 others in a spy swap.  President Putin declared at that time that Skripal and other defectors were "traitors" who "will kick the bucket" because they had "betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange - those 30 pieces of silver - they will choke on them." 
Putin is seeking 70% of the vote and another 6 years in power in the forthcoming Russian elections, to be held on 18 March.  Because defectors are "traitors" to the Russian Nationalists who vote for Putin, their assassination may be politically helpful.  In addition, it may deter opponents of Putin from standing in his way.  In 2006, the FSB was granted the Russian legal authority to liquidate enemies abroad, on Putin's orders.  Former Colonel Alexander Litvinenko was then assassinated with Po-210 (of Russian isotopic composition) in his teapot by Russian agents, in a London restaurant in 2006.  
After Skripal was traded for Russian spies in 2010, he bought a £260,000 four-bedroom house in Salisbury with cash, and reportedly gave guest lectures about the FSB to British military students.  Skripal was described as friendly and happy by local shopkeeper Ebru Ozturk, 41, and by his neighbour James Puttock.  However, he was very impatient with the delay of service of his lunch in the Zizzi restaurant after arriving at 2:30pm.  This possibly suggests that he had a meeting scheduled for around 3:30pm (with assassin?).  It is even possible that the meeting was deliberately scheduled to occur on the bench they were found on, the seat being sprayed with liquid nerve agent by the assassin, so that no face-to-face meeting occurred (i.e. they may have been poisoned by sitting on the seat).

Paragraph 20 in the 1972 Medical Manual of Defence Against Chemical Agents (Ministry of Defence publication J.S.P. 312) explains this difference in symptoms following inhalation/ingestion and (slower) skin absorption, and the fact that the policeman treating the victims himself was contaminated and seriously affected proves that the source must have been skin contamination:

Nerve gas symptoms of Sergei Skripal suggest slow acting skin contamination.  That book recommends for treatment a dose of 4 grams of Pralidoxime Mesylate (so-called "oxime" in chemical warfare jargon) every 6 hours, in conjunction with sufficient atropine to relax muscles (i.e. to return the eye pupils from tiny points to normal size, 2mm diameter or so, and to return the heart rate to normal 72/minute).

The weather was relatively cool (around 7-10C) that Sunday afternoon, with a thaw that day melting all of the record early spring snowfall across Britain that had occurred on 28 February-1 March, so liquids would have evaporated gradually from skin, leaving contamination present for the time scale of the pre-hospitalisation emergency.  The manual also gives a nice differential diagnosis table (Table V, pages 45-46) specifically to IMMEDIATELY identify the type of nerve gas poisoning, from a proper, full analysis of all the symptoms observed (and to distinguish other gases):



The point about the differential diagnosis table for chemical warfare symptoms is that you regularly see baffled and confused reporters on TV news talking about the symptoms seen in various gas attacks in Syria, which is simply unnecessary.  This military UK chemical war medicine book was published in 1972 by H. M. Stationery Office (UK government bookshop/publisher), with unclassified, unlimited distribution permitted.

Ironically, the corresponding 1965 UK government civil defence manual, The Detection and Identification of War Gases, was classified Restricted (banning it from the eyes of the "free" press).  It contains very useful data in Table I (page 47) on the evaporation rates, relative to water, of nerve gases.  For example, nerve liquids tabun and sarin are stated to take 86 times and 2.95 times, respectively longer to evaporate than water at 15C.

For mustard gas and lewisite (not nerve gases, but blister agents) the table gives evaporation times, respectively, 58 and 9.5 times slower than water.  This kind of comparison with water seems more useful to really grasping the nature of the threat by understanding the persistence of liquid nerve agents, than the usual statements giving specific persistence times  in hours in most chemical war handbooks (these times are usually for something like for 90% of a deposit of 10 grams/square metre to evaporate under standard laboratory conditions, or for a range of different surfaces, which makes the data hard to comprehend and understand by reference to normal experiences).  We all know that the persistence of water spills and droplets depends on their size, on the temperature, etc.  Giving persistence relative to water is more helpful for grasping the magnitude of the delayed hazard.

Some additional interesting facts that the media are not alluding to at present:

(1) This nerve liquid poisoning of former double agent Colonel Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, seems at first glance to have been bungled by the FSB (Putin's modernised KGB), just as the poisoning of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko by alpha radiation from Po-210 in his teapot (which has longish 138 days half life!) in London in 2006.  Why use these agents, nerve agents and radioactive materials which can be fingerprinted to Lubyanka Moscow FSB headquarters (by isotopic impurities and so on, since Po-210 is produced by irradiating bismuth with neutrons in a reactor, the results depending on irradiation time)?  Why not use a commonplace chemical poison bought in Britain, or shoot the person?  Thus, clearly Putin's FSB is deliberately sending out a signal to deter dissidents by making them fear the reach of Russian influence abroad, in Britain.  He is not trying to quietly make people disappear, but to provoke terror.

(2) This is an old tactic, reminding us of Stalin's order for his enemy Trotsky (author of The Revolution Betrayed, an attack on Stalin) to be eliminated by an agent using an ice pick in Mexico (a country that never gets ice!), or of the umbrella-type injector used to fire a small pellet containing lethal ricin into the back of the thigh of Bulgarian (Warsaw Pact) communist dissident Georgi Markov, aged 49, at a bus stop in London on 7 September 1978.  Markov had been standing at the bus stop to get a bus to the BBC at Bush House.  Four days later he died in hospital in London from ricin poisoning.  His was a slow, painful death that allowed the assassin to escape and led to blanket news scare stories that probably deterred other dissidents from speaking out against communist Bulgaria.

This is probably the point about the skin contamination with nerve liquid on Sunday and the teapot contaminated with polonium-210 twelve years ago: these poisons acted slowly enough to allow the assassins to escape Scot free (which would be less likely if the attack was clearer to identify, such as an assassin's gun shot), and also maximised the suffering of the victims, thereby making news headlines and thus helping to deter future episodes.  Most dissidents will probably shut up and hide away now.  It does however bring back memories of the Cold War.

The prolonging of the Syrian civil war to help Moscow's friend Assad win, by Russian vetoes on (pseudo) "United Nations" propaganda lies (a nasty fascist tactic to prolong terror by replacing actions with double talk and utopian fantasy, costing many thousands of lives), and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea in January 2014 have already shown the situation plainly.  Is Russia really that impoverished?  It doesn't have the colossal national debts (trillions of dollars, trillions of pounds) that West has.  Overall, the "wealth" of the West is more or less cancelled out by its debt obligations.  Russia's economy is weak compared to the West, but by the very fact, it is more resilient to crises on stock markets, debt interest rate hikes, and so on.  It is investing heavily in new nuclear weapon delivery systems, according to Putin's recent 1 March 2018 speech to Russia's Federal Assembly, such as underwater nuclear drones.




Above: President Putin is taking the approach of Ronald Reagan or "Iron Lady" Thatcher by standing up to the West and its allies, including dissidents such as Colonel Sergei Skripal, which boosts his popularity for forthcoming Russian elections.  In a way, he is justified in asserting Russian nationalism and challenging the Western hostility towards Russia that is hypocritical in that, as soon as someone like Trump is elected, or Brexit is voted in, the socialist media goes off democracy!  Certainly if you want strong leadership, Putin is that.  Similarly, Islam is a strong religion in the sense that its followers are generally less hypocritical and undisciplined than many Christians.  It boils down to moral compass values: do you put principled ideals ahead of practical realities, like military power and enforcing discipline?  We can respect Putin for his toughness, without agreeing with everything he does.

We should use Cold War successes to deter the kind of invasions that trigger off major wars.  Appeasement was a not a failure because Chamberlain went to meet the dictators in September 1938; it was a failure because, when he went, he lacked the military power to make his wishes credible (Reagan met Gorbachev at the October 1987 summit with a very different outcome, because Reagan's handshake "appeasement" was backed up with immense thermonuclear power!).  The lesson is that you get peace only when you negotiate from a position of strength, not weakness.

Update (13 March 2018):

Russia has been given until midnight to explain how the Russian made nerve agent came to be used against a Russian dissident in the UK.  The nerve agent was named by the British Government yesterday as Russian Novichok class (the Russian for "newcomer"), some of which are reportedly 5-8 times more lethal than VX (which North Korea used last year at an airport to eliminate Kim Jong-Nam, the defector and half brother of dictator Kim Jong-Un).  Novichok works in the same way as all other organophosphate nerve agents, causing muscles to contract tightly by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase which normally breaks down acetylcholine, the chemical that triggers muscular contraction.  Therefore, atropine is still valid and helps to counteract Novichok by relaxing muscles.

The UK government's response, in waiting a week before instructing almost 500 people who were in the affected areas to wash their clothes and wipe their phones clean, seems to be the usual groupthink civil defence bureaucracy which combines official secrecy with fear of causing a panic, and ends up giving out advice that is so over-simplified that it appears to be directed at two-year-olds.  The ultimatum to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who has the same poker faced lawyer mentality of the USSR's Brezhnev era Andrei Gromyko (who denied the existence of Russian missiles in Cuba to President Kennedy's face in 1962), is likely to lead to an escalation of the crisis, instead of deterring aggression and thus keeping civil relations.  Sanctions failed against Japan (1937-1941) and Iraq (1992-2002), unlike credible deterrence (i.e. Reagan's experience, in the 1980s).

Update (18 March 2018):

Britain's Foreign Secretary has disclosed that there is evidence Russia has for the past 10 years been building up an illegal stockpile of Novichok nerve agent, contrary to its treaty obligations:

Boris Johnson has said the UK is in possession of evidence that Russia has been exploring nerve-agent based assassinations and that the country has been stockpiling deadly chemical weapons in the last decade. 
The Foreign Secretary in particular claimed Britain has reason to believe Moscow has been collecting the “military grade” Novichok nerve agent that the UK Government says was deployed in the Salisbury attack. 
He made the comments moments after a senior Russian diplomat claimed his country has no stockpile of any nerve agent, and even suggested the source of the chemical used in Salisbury was the UK’s Porton Down military laboratory.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-russia-nerve-agent-stockpiling-chemical-weapon-assassinations-a8261771.html

This has implications for other Russian weapons of mass destruction, for example their nuclear weapons stockpile figures, which may similarly be misleading.  In other words, there is reason to distrust claims of disarmament in accordance to paper treaties, just as occurred from 1933 onward in Germany.  Because you acquire a signed declaration, you feel assured that you have achieved peace.  If, however, one side is dishonest, then your confidence becomes not only groundless, but dangerously deceptive, because you will point to the paper and signature as an excuse to disarm relative to the (secretly rearming) aggressor.

After the 1930s "disarmament of Germany" delusion, "arms control" used international inspectors to verify the crushing of specific numbers of missile shells, i.e. the relatively large delivery systems.  However, as we saw when arms control inspectors were trying to assess Iraq's WMDs before 2002, it is harder to police chemical war agents and even the small masses of nuclear fissile materials inside warheads, due to secrecy and the amounts of material involved.  Iraq probably hid its chemical weapons in barrels under the desert sands, where they remain.  Is that "destruction" or "stockpiling"?  Just because you can't readily find a needle in the proverbial haystack, does that disprove that the needle exists there somewhere? Or is it more like a game of hide and seek?


SUMMARY

Russian now has illegal stockpiles of Novichok nerve gas for war use, which it denies having. Due to the appeasement of Putin, there are 346,000 confirmed dead in Syria, another 56,900 missing presumed dead, 13,100,000 living in misery, and 5,600,000 refugees. In August 2012, President Obama, who had already received the Nobel Peace Prize, stated that the: "red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised." Putin supplied Assad to gas 400 kids and 1,100 adults in Damascus. President Obama withdrew his stated "red line". Last April, Trump ordered retaliation against Assad's air base in response to Assad's sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun. Too little, too late. But Trump was not President when the Syrian war began at Deraa in March 2011, when Assad massacred pro-democracy supporters. Somebody else was. Guess who?

Again, I'll repost the following call for common sense in the face of this new gas threat:


Daily Express columnist calls for gas mask civil defence, Daily Express, 15 April 2017, page 19.
Doubtless, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will continue to hurl abuse at anyone who wants civil defence to help save lives, but at least he is thereby showing his true colours of anti-Western hatred:


Jeremy Corbyn's BBC "Newsnight" propaganda poster (the hat is NOT photoshopped to look like Lenin's - it was a copy of Lenin's in the original which fits into all of Corbyn's Marxist dogmatism, contrary to claims that the BBC is against Corbyn which is "fake news"), to maximise his Communist fan base vote, supporting Putin to gas kids in Syria.  Source of poster: click here. (For more on Corbyn's hatred of the truth, please see the previous blog post or this article; the pseudo-liberal, democracy hating, nuclear effects lying mindset is the same as the German leader elected in 1933 on a promise of eugenics pseudoscience, borrowing money to supposedly "invest" in national debt for unprofitable nationalised industry, and then provoking a war to divert attention from the economic failure due to the debt problems.  That's "socialism" in a nutshell; we have covered Jeremy Corbyn's CND ranting lies against simple lifesaving civil defence for use in Syria again and again.  He ignores it all.  But Russia is not the sole problem; the "socialists" support ALL terrorists and thugs in the ill-informed belief that they can exploit it for "divide and rule" politics.  This is why they supported IRA bombers, the USSR, ISIS, and the Nazis who invaded Poland JOINTLY with the USSR in 1939, a collaboration of racist terrorists and evil mass murderers that lasted until June 1941!  Until the media, historians, and scientists begin to face up to the unvarnished facts about the "communist" racists, they will continue as they did in 1936, when many attended the Nazi Olympics (instead of at least boycotting it!), and simply ignored the terrorism by uncritically accepting the enemy propaganda lies for "peace".  Their idea of "peace" is genocide in concentration camps, denouncing deterrence and civil defense to be "warmongering", and so on! They are completely deluded by fascist Marxism, an intolerance of free speech and objective criticisms!)




Update (22 March 2018) on the Novichok A234 nerve agent and Russian denials/propaganda



Novichok nerve agent A234 used by Putin against Britain in an attack on 4 March 2018 is today the top news for chemistry experts.




"Novichok – choline esterase inhibitors (Novichok 5 and Novichok 7). They are effecting very rapidly, penetrate through the skin and respiratory system. Novichok 5 exceeds effectiveness of soman by 10 times and of VX by 5 to 8 times. Novichok 5 (Substance A-232) and its ethyl-analog (Substance A-234) can be produced in binary form by using acetonitrile and an organic phosphate compound.12 System of agent A232 components was successfully tested in Nukus Uzbekistan, in the military chemical proving ground in 1992. Existence of the “Foliant” program and Novichok were revealed in 1992 by chemists Lev Fedorov and Vil Mirzayanov in an article of the newspaper Moscow News. ... Russia has officially never acknowledged the existence of the group Novichok." 
- GYÖRGYI VÁSÁRHELYI and LÁSZLÓ FÖLDI, "History of Russia’s chemical weapons", AARMS HISTORY, Volume 6, issue No. 1 (2007), pages 135–146. 
(NOTE THE DATE OF 2007 OF THAT PAPER, WHICH DISPROVES LYING RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA CLAIMS THAT PORTON DOWN HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE ATTACK.)



One depiction of the chemical structure of the Novichok A234 agent which was illegally used by Russia to commit a terrorist act in Britain, 4 March 2018.  In olden times, this would have constituted an act of war, not an opportunity for Stalinist propaganda from Russia.  Britain can test the properties of such chemicals in powerful chemical molecule simulations by computer, or by using trace amounts.  Contrary to Russian propaganda, this is entirely different from making enough of the agent in a military grade for an attack.  The evidence points strongly towards Putin, since he is behind covert attacks on Ukraine, Georgia, Crimea, London in 2006 using radioactive Po-210, and supplying Assad with nerve gas in Syria.


"Much of what is publicly known about Novichok agents comes from Vil Mirzayanov, an analytical chemist who worked for the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT), a notorious chemical weapons laboratory. Mirzayanov developed methods to detect nerve agents created and tested in the U.S.S.R.’s chemical weapons facilities. His techniques would be used to monitor the environment for any traces of the agents that might reveal the labs’ activities to foreign intelligence services. 
"In the late 1980s, Mirzayanov’s analytical techniques revealed that nerve agents were befouling the air and water around one of these facilities, posing a major health risk. So he went public, revealing details of the U.S.S.R.’s chemical weapons program to Moscow News in 1992. Officials arrested and imprisoned Mirzayanov, but eventually dropped the case against him. In 1995, he immigrated to the U.S., where he subsequently wrote a book about his experiences, titled “State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program. Mirzayanov writes that the USSR produced a few tons of Novichok-5 and tens of tons of Novichok-7.  According to Tucker, the USSR carried out open-air tests of Novichok-5 in the early 1990s on the Ustyurt Plateau, a desert area ... Novichok-5 and -7 act very rapidly, penetrating the skin and respiratory system."
- https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i12/Nerve-agent-attack-on-spy-used-Novichok-poison.html


The Novichok A234 nerve agent (the ethyl analog of Novichok-5) used in the UK has probably helped foster popularity for Putin (by reinforcing the eternal myth that Russia is surrounded by aggressive imperialists) in the recent Russian elections whereby he was re-elected for a fourth term; another 6 years as Russian President or dictator in effect, due to his tough suppression of any credible alternatives/critics.

Russian propaganda in the UK is, as in the Cold War, now exploiting the UK's pathetic bureaucratic official secrecy system to claim some conspiracy theory, that the evidence for Novichok A234 is a British invention, just as they did 12 years ago for the Po-210 poisoning.  My opinion on secrecy follows that of Edward Teller (see link at the top of this blog post to Teller's call for less secrecy).  We need to declassify what we know about Novichok nerve agent A234, to destroy this propaganda.

Please also see recent comments to this post concerning the need for an urgent effort to stockpile CREDIBLE nuclear deterrents and also civil defense countermeasures against invasions by Russian troops supported by Novichok nerve agent.  Waiting for another crisis before acting may be too late.

In 2008, the former USSR chemical warfare scientist Dr Vil S. Mirzayanov (born 1935 in Russia) exposed Russian Novichok nerve gas research in his book State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program.  The continuing denial by Russia is proof that they are being as dishonest about Novichok as they were about Russian missiles in Cuba in October 1962, when Kennedy had to declassify and publish on TV top secret photos of missiles taken from a U2 spy plane.  The West needs to declassify the truth to debunk enemy obfuscation and propaganda.
Dr Vil Mirzayanov - the Russian inventor of Novichok nerve gas, with a publicity poster for his 2008 book which exposed Russian nerve gas warfare work - responding to the 4 March 2018 attack by Russia against the United Kingdom (Credit: Daily Mail.)


Dr Mirzayanov has recently described the horrifying effects of his invention, Novichok:

Vil Mirzayanov described the use of the lethal toxins as a 'brazen' attack by Vladimir Putin, who 'thinks he can use everything to kill enemies'.  Mr Mirzayanov says a large dose of Novichok 'paralyses' victims before 'it causes convulsions, you can't breathe and after that you die'.  The exiled scientist shocked the world in 1992 when he revealed that promises by the Soviet Union to reduce its chemical weapon stockpiles were hollow.  He worked in the top-secret Moscow laboratory where a new generation of even more potent poisons was being perfected. These gruesome chemical weapons, named 'Novichok' after the Russian for 'newcomer', were designed to be even more lethal than VX or sarin.  At the time, one former top Soviet military adviser described them as 'political weapons', adding: 'They have a powerful moral and psychological effect.' ...
Speaking from his home in New Jersey last night, Mr Mirzayanov, 83, described the top-secret laboratory as a 'criminal enterprise'.
'It's a brazen attack,' he said. 'Putin thinks he can use everything to kill enemies. They don't tolerate any opponents. They should be punished. It's an open demonstration of this Russian terrorism.  The Russian government is telling people who are thinking about revealing more secrets that they can expect the same fate.'  Asked how the nerve agent works, he added: 'It's for paralysing people, it causes you convulsions and you can't breathe and after that you die. If you get enough of a dose of it.  It's real torture, it's impossible to imagine. Even in low doses the pain can go on for weeks. You cannot imagine the horror, it's so bad.' 
The Novichok family of nerve agents were secretly developed over two decades at a research facility 50 miles outside the Russian capital. ... 
Describing his work, Mr Mirzayanov said: 'They were normal laboratories, they were not underground or anything. They were testing and developing.  There were around 1,000 people working on this, it was a big deal. You have to test it on animals and after that you have to study the chemical properties... so many laboratories were involved.' 
In 1987, one physicist at the laboratory was saved despite being exposed to the chemical when a ventilator stopped working. Witnesses described how he staggered out of the room, describing seeing bright hallucinations before collapsing and being rushed to hospital by the KGB. He was left with permanent injuries after being critically ill for ten days and unable to walk for six months. 
- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5492781/Scientist-reveals-horror-lethal-nerve-agent-Novichok.html


Above: In his 2008 book about Novichok, Dr Mirzayanov discredits the so-called Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (CWC) as being a deliberately loop-hole filled Russian negotiated front to allow Russia to build up a clandestine stockpile of nerve gas, which Russia lied about.  In the book Dr Mirzayanov explains that, after he had disclosed the facts of Novichok to the media in September 1992, the successor to the KGB arrested him for "disclosing state secrets", hardly an action they would take if Russia's stockpile of illegal Novichok nerve gas was imaginary or a joke.

He was sent to Matrosskaya Tishina maximum security prison as punishment.  He states in the book that the Russians attached sixty "secret and top secret" Russian government reports on Novichok to his indictment, which he was able to: "copy out legally during my study of the case materials ... 51 of them are attached to this book in the Annexes.  From these documents, it is possible to get some idea of how the Novichok program ... was going on in the Soviet Union, then in Russia."

So there are actual secret and top secret classified Russian documents on Novichok that discredit Russian denials as complete lies.  Dr Mirzayanov also explains in his 2008 book that the chemical arms control delusions have failed with Novichok: "After his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and Russia's signing of the Agreement on the Nonproduction and Elimination of Chemical Weapons (CWC) on September 23, 1989, by Edward Shevardnadze, Mikhail Gorbachev ... signed Resolution no 844-186 of the Central Committee of CPSU and Council of Ministers on October 6, 1989, sanctioning the start up of the binary [Novichok nerve gas] weapons program.  Already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Gorbachev on April 23, 1991 awarded the Lenin Prize to the leaders of the Military Chemical Complex for the successful development, testing and production of these arms.  Despite the fall of the Communist regime, the Novichok program continued ..."



Update, 28 March 2018: Novichok was sprayed on the front door of Sergei Skripal's house

"The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter are believed to have been poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent at their home, police said.  Detectives identified the highest concentration of the novichok nerve agent on the front door of their address in Christie Miller Road, in Salisbury.  Mr Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, remain in critical condition in hospital. The Metropolitan Police said traces of the nerve agent have been found at some of the other scenes detectives have been working at over the past few weeks, but at lower concentrations. ... Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing said: “At this point in our investigation, we believe the Skripals first came into contact with the nerve agent from their front door." ... It comes after Russia, which has faced increasing global isolation after being held responsible for the attack, suggested UK intelligence officers may have been involved in the poisoning of Mr Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.  The Kremlin made the allegation after at least 26 countries expelled a total of more than 130 suspected spies in response.  Britain insists there is no other plausible explanation for the novichok attack and has dismissed a series of suggestions emanating from Moscow as nonsense. "
In the introduction to his 2008 book about Russia's illegal and covert Novichok nerve gas program, State Secrets, Dr Vil Mirayanov writes:

"Even though the concept of Democracy was beginning to catch on fire in Russia, nothing was fundamentally changing.  I became involved with the Democratic Movement at my institute, and tried to persuade people to stop producing chemical agents, and I appealed to Moscow's Mayor Gravril Popov, but there were no results.  Reluctantly at first, then more resolutely, I became a whistleblower. ... If I hadn't spoken up, who would have?  Probably no one in the rest of the world would have known about Novichok.
"I appealed to the world community to pay attention to this problem in my first article published in the Moscow newspaper Kuranty in 1991, but there was no reaction.  Then two more articles appeared in the September of 1992 issues of Moscow News and The Baltimore Sun, which resulted in my arrest for 'divulging state secrets'.  This was the beginning of my persecution ... Despite my revelations and the ratification of the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention] by Russia, the Novichok program was not put under international control and ... the binary components [which when mixed together produce the nerve agent] are not on the list of controlled compounds of CWC.  This is very troubling because there are no guarantees that Russia isn't continuing such secret programs.  These are all extremely compelling reasons for amending the CWC to include these chemicals, but nothing has been done about it.  I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed that these loopholes that were written into the CWC could very well have been built in intentionally."
What Dr Mirayanov is saying is plain truth about the old Stalinist trick of pushing for arms control agreements that contain loopholes; if they succeed and get the useless piece of paper, then go ahead and violate the spirit of the agreement.  On the other hand, if other nations refuse to agree to a useless (misleading) arms control agreement that contains loopholes, then they put on a grand show of denouncing the rest of the world as warmongers who don't want arms control and then go on building their stockpile up.  Either way, the result is much the same.  Stalin began this in 1946 by vetoing the Baruch Plan for postwar nuclear arms control (which contained good verification procedures) and proposing instead a rival scheme, which left out the careful inspections and so would not stop Russia secretly producing nuclear weapons!  The problem in 1946 was that it was just a decade since Hitler had violated German arms control laws, so nobody was being fooled by signatures on papers that were not backed up by proper inspections.
As Herman Kahn points out lucidly in On Thermonuclear War, Khrushchev did the same in the 1950s, long before the Cuban Missile Crisis, he claimed that anybody violating a test ban treaty (by detonating a bomb in a large underground cavity or cave, to decouple the seismic signal) would "cover themselves in shame".  He didn't exactly cover himself in shame in October 1962 when he lied about the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba, forcing Kennedy to publish the top secret U2 spy plane photos on TV to convince the public of which side of the story was the truth.  The point is, yet again, that laws don't work anywhere: people break them, countries break them when their leaders are powerful enough to do so.  The pieces of paper signed by Hitler in 1938 guaranteed no WWII.  They were illusions.  All that really counts is enforcement, and that will always risk confrontations and violence.

Update: Easter Sunday 1 April 2018, recent UK newspaper clippings highlights

Easter 2018 news of President Putin's latest 200 tons Satan 2 Sarmat missile, which can take 12 warheads 6,000 miles with up to 20 times the speed of sound:

Daily Express Saturday 31 March 2018 front page on Russian President Putin's new Satan 2 missile test at Easter 2018.  Putin seems to be deliberately accompanying his military build up with provocative acts of defiance at the West, such as escalating the Novichok nerve gas attack by retaliatory steps against token spy expulsions.  It appears that he is determined to been seen as a new man of steel, a replacement Stalin perhaps.



The Sun 21 February 2018 exposes Jeremy Corbyn threat to suppress freedom of the press to ask questions, after he was exposed for associating with a Czech communist spy in the Cold War (Corbyn also was friendly to Jew hating terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and even opposed bombing ISIS).  As a result, the present UK Government has no effective opposition on defence matters, and is not being held to account.  We are impartial, and do believe that while the current UK Conservative Government has more moderate leadership at present than Labour, nevertheless it needs proper debates and an efficient challenge from an opposition.  Corbyn is a danger because he fails to provide this, and is currently obsessed with CND style disarmament propaganda from the Cold War, which as we proved in previous posts, was basically a front for Russian aggression.  He is engaging in double-talk over fascist Jew haters in his party.
The Sun 21 February 2018 Jeremy Corbyn and communist spy facts he refuses to discuss: the problem is that when faced with criticism, Corbyn starts behaving like Putin or Stalin, even when just in opposition.  How much paranoia and abuse of power would his bizarre behaviour lead to in power?

Daily Express Saturday 31 March 2018 page 2, exposing how zealot fascism of Jew haters in Labour thrives under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn's duplicity.  Corbyn's personal friend, former London Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone, a staunch Marxist proponent of the USSR in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, sparked off the Labour fascist anti-Semitic fury by declaring that Hitler was a Jew supporting Zionist who backed the creation of the state of Israel "before he went a bit mad."  Sensible folk think that Livingstone and his friends, like Corbyn, are more than a "bit" mad themselves.  Labour peer, surgeon Lord Winston states (Daily Express, 31 March 2018, page 2):

"Whether he likes it or not, Jeremy Corbyn has a lot to answer for.  He has encouraged anti-Semites and he's endorsed them."

The same article reports that 39 Labour MPs have signed a letter calling for hard-left Momentum group (Corbyn's effective brownshirts) director to be suspended from Labour's National Executive Committee, because she defended a Holocaust denier who was a candidate (she later claimed she did not know he was a Holocaust denier, despite defending him after he was suspended for that).  Last night (31 March 2018), she resigned instead of being fired by Corbyn, who has the temerity to continue claiming to be both a pacifist and an anti-racist!  Imagine how these hypocrites would behave if given state power in Britain to bring about Nazi like National Socialism, defending Holocaust deniers.  In such a situation, rather than allowing defenders of Holocaust deniers to resign and not be fired, they would be orchestrating state actions against "Jews and capitalists" whose taxes ironically provide key funding to support the regime.  The problem here is that Britain is now very much in the position of Germany circa 1930 or Russia circa 1917.  The "left" are being supported by fascist type National Socialists of communist persuasion, who love the fact that Russia hasn't really changed that much since the Cold War, and want it here.  Miss Shawcroft and the BBC naturally claim that the hatred of Jews by Corbyn's pal Livingstone and his followers is being exaggerated by the media: the old "shoot the messenger" tactic:

"This whole row is being stirred up to attack Jeremy.  That someone who has spent his whole life fighting racism [rather, defending racist terrorists who are fighting Jews and stirring up "divide and rule" racism, is the truth] ... should find himself being accused of not doing enough to counter it, absolutely beggars belief" (so said Momentum's director Christine Shawcroft a few hours before being allowed to resign by Corbyn).
Another newspaper, Daily Mail 27 March 2018, with the headline "Labour's a refuge for racists", also exposing demonstrations against Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn's fanatical racism: "Corbyn dubbed 'poster boy of anti-Semites' by one of his MPs."
Daily Mail, 27 March 2018, page 19 "The Real Fascists Today are on the Left": an article again exposing the fanatical racism of Left Wing British Labour Party, which stems from their belief in terrorism by ISIS and other jihadists who attack Jews in Israel, or who deny the Holocaust (or want appeasement, to trigger WWIII).  But this is not new.  Jews in the Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe were terrorised and massacred by USSR backed commies, who used them as scapegoat "capitalists" to rob and vent their hatred upon.
Daily Express 15 March 2018, page 12, article explaining how Corbyn sides with Putin in new Cold War.  Basically, Corby believes in "divide and rule": side with the enemies of the country and encourage them to destroy the democratically elected government with nerve gas, cyber attacks or even all out war, then Corbyn can sneak in pretending to be a "pacifist" and "peacemaker".  His old 1980s CND tactic, debunked by Frederick Forsyth's novel The Fourth Protocol (where Russia tries to a covert attack on Britain in the belief that it can use CND to trigger UK nuclear disarmament and thus allow USSR expansion into Western Europe, with the American's watching their own backs for fear of being attacked if they step in).  Corbyn hates NATO, has always opposed it, and automatically seems to love anyone, especially Putin, who confronts Western democracy.
Daily Express 17 March 2018, page 22: journalist Richard Madeley explains how the world is in denial of the new Cold War, a fact that bigoted pseudo-pacifists love to ignore.
Daily Mail 27 March 2018, pages 8 and 9: "Labour MP accuses Corbyn of lies over attitude to Moscow".  Jeremy Corbyn has now actually been accused of lying about his stance on Russia for votes by John Woodcock, a Labour MP.  This is a far cry from Labour's 1945 elected Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who ordered the building of the first British nuclear weapon to deter Russia from invading Western Europe, and also re-started the Civil Defence Corp under the 1948 Civil Defence Act, to ensure proper sheltering against widespread collateral damage from blast and radiation, and who increased wartime rationing after WWII in an austerity drive to help fund the NHS, instead of borrowing money the country to add irresponsibly to the national debt.  Therefore, Corbyn is anti-Attlee, and is a pseudo-socialist who just wants to vandalise democracy, security, freedom, and progressive liberal values with Marxism.
Daily Mail 27 March 2018 page 1 exposing demonstrations by Jews against persecution by the hard left wing racism of Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, his friends and his supporters.
Daily Express 28 March 2018 on page 12 calls for moderates in the Labour Party to stand up the racist leadership of Mr Corbyn: "Merely by continuing to be Labour MPs they are helping work towards Mr Corbyn's arrival in Downing Street.  Yet they know how dangerous this would be to the country ..."

Daily Express 28 March 2018 page 4 exposed the fact that Labour Leader Corbyn was shown the facts about Novichok but he shamefully ignored them (just as he does when we write to him about the effects of nuclear weapons, the facts debunking the CND agenda as a warmongering pseudo-pacifism which would return the world to the war days of 1914 and 1939), and defended President Putin instead of Britain.
Communist Cold War Czech spy Lt Jan Dymic met Britains current Labour Leader at least four times in the last Cold War, according the archivist Svetlana Ptacknikova, as reported by The Sun, 21 February 2018, page 21.
Daily Mail 2 March 2018 page 1, exposing an apartheid racist friend of the Corbyn's deputy Tom Watson, proving that it is not just Corbyn's own "pockets of racism" (Corbyn's term) within the Labour Party, but the pockets of his deputy too.  The party is riddled with racism under the leadership of CND supporting, ranting pseudo-pacifist Corbyn.

Above: Daily Express 27 March 2018 on page 2 reports that Labour MP Luciana Berger, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, states: "Anti-Semitism is very real and its alive in the Labour Party."  The latest outrage is Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn's Facebook posting showing solidarity with abnormal racists who drew a hate attack painting of Jews.  Corbyn later simply claimed he wished he had looked more closely at the racist painting before endorsing it.  Now, if I was a lawyer, I'd explain to Corbyn that such excuses of incompetence to cover for racism are not adequate.  (You cannot excuse yourself for homicide by saying you simply didn't look closely enough at who you were stabbing with your knife.)  The question a court would have to address, is "did you defend racism, yes or no?", not "can you come up with an excuse off the top of your head for defending racism".  Put another way, a judge would be happy to listen to claims about mitigating circumstances when deciding what punishment is due (the length of imprisonment or the fine), but that is a completely separate issue from the question of whether someone broke a law.  E.g., if you had an eyesight problem or were in a hurry when driving, and consequently kill someone, such an excuse does not refute all responsibility for the terror you caused.

Daily Express 26 March 2018, page 9 publishing a challenge against British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn's racism dogma by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council: "We have had enough of hearing Jeremy Corbyn 'opposes anti-Semitism' whilst the mainstream majority of British Jews, and their concerns, are ignored by him.  When Jews complain about an obviously anti-Semitic mural in Tower Hamlets in London, Corbyn supports the artist.  Hexbollah commits terrorist atrocities against Jews but Corbyn calls them his friends and attends Hezbollah rallies in London.  Exactly the same goes for Hamas.  Raed Salah says Jews kill Christian children to drink their blood.  Corbyn opposes his extradition and invites him for tea at the Commons."


Hate inciting racist Rael Salah was supported by Corbyn, who opposed his extradition and then invited him for tea at House of Commons, because it fits into Corbyn's anti-Western agenda of destroying democracy to impose a Marxist state.

To understand this tragic situation of how millions of Britons are now being fooled by fake news into backing someone with similar views to Hitler, let's get back to fundamentals.  The USSR-Nazi Pact in August 1939 lasted until June 1941, a grey era in USSR history textbooks since Stalin deleted the facts just as he literally had Trotsky airbrushed out of all photos featuring Lenin, after Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed.  This August 1939 to June 1941 period of Nazi-Russian collaboration included the joint invasion, in September 1939, of Poland by Germany and Russia, Russia's invasion of Finland, and the Russian genocide against Poles (the Katryn Forest Massacre).  All during the Cold War, Marxists in the West like Corbyn called for CND type unilateral nuclear disarmament to allow Russia to impose its brand of dictatorship on the West.  The real drive behind Corbyn now is the young, who have been exposed by biased Nation Union of Teachers "anti-war" propaganda to a fairy tale version of history, in which wicked imperialists caused the Cold War against loving, honest Marxists.  Not true.  We got the bomb in the first place to end World War.  Don't forget that, please.

http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/ blog statistics today 1 April 2018 show that March 2018 corresponds to 48,859 page views, a record number.  The "all time" page views of 1,713,360 is only for the period of May 2010 to end March 2018, and excludes the four years 2006-2010.  It is worth publishing this, because the CND fanatics use a specious argument that if something isn't proved to be mainstream, they can ignore it for being a minority viewpoint (no matter how crucial the point is), while if something is mainstream, then they ignore it for being "populist".  They also attack the messenger while ignoring the message, but that is pretty commonplace among pseudo-liberals who claim to be progressive, yet cling on to fallacies long ago proven to be dangerous, illusory dogma. It is interesting that France and Russia both now have a higher number of total page views than local visitors in the UK.


Sunday Times 1 April 2018 is NOT an April Fools Day Joke but is too little too late because Corbyn is a danger to us all.  We have long exposed the slide towards racist hate incitement by Marxist bigots on this blog, but we were ignored.  Now it may be too late, unless action is taken quickly to suppress illegal racists who want to incite race wars for political gain.


War declared against the racists of anti nuclear deterrence (CND), anti-civil defence, and pro Hamas terrorism supporter Corbyn by Sir David Garrard, £1.5 million Labour Party donor


Not funny clowns at all: fascist hate incitement defending racism in Britain's "politically correct" Nazi National Socialist "peace" party threatens WWIII by repeating the errors of the past, when the (pseudo) Liberal Party in 1914 failed to deter aggression and Chamberlain's Conservatives in 1939 failed to deter aggression, helped by an "opposition" of fascist loving appeasers who cheered every handshake Chamberlain gave to Hitler for worthless "arms control" and "anti-war, pro peace promises".








Update: 2 April 2018 on calls for police to arrest the criminal friends, followers and racists of anti-nuclear CND bigot Jeremy Corbyn

Daily Express 2 April 2018 pages 6 and 7 exposing pressure on UK police to arrest Labour Party racists led by Corbyn.
Above: Daily Express 2 April 2018, pages 6 and 7, exposing pressure on UK police to arrest friends and colleagues of "uh oh" Jeremy Corbyn for charges of inciting racial hatred and related hate crimes. Enforcement of law is needed for law to be upheld.  (The Uh Oh Jeremy Corbyn thing is from a comment on this blog; for readers who are lucky not to live in the UK, the Brownshirt gang of racists who beat up Jews are called Momentum now, and they sing "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh Jeremy Corbyn" lovingly to their "dear leader" almost every day on BBC TV to make him seem nice.  The commenter added an "Uh" before the "Oh", for reality.)


ABOVE: Another Labour supporter, Labour Peer Lord Sugar tweeted a photoshopped picture of Comrade Corbyn with Comrade Hitler in order apparently to boost Nazi support for Corbyn (although he later claimed it was some sort of sick "joke"), then deleted it on orders of Corbyn's comrade Dr Goebbels aka IRA terrorism lover Comrade McDonnell, who continues to display a plaque to IRA terrorists in his study, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Update 4 April 2018:
The Times front 4 April 2018 exposing racism of antinuclear anti civil defence leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Daily Express page 6 of 4 April 2018 exposing racism of antinuclear anti civil defence leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Daily Mail 4 April 2018 page 1 Corbyn racist stunt of attending the anti-Jew "Judas" aka "Jewdas" satire on the Jewish Passover.  The equivalent in terms of Islam would be to ridicule the Islamic Eid festival, which traditionally means a death sentence.  Racism is the hypocrisy of discrimination against Jews or bias against a specific race.  Corbyn indeed discriminates against the Jewish race, for he only attends satires that insult orthodox Jews, not Islam.
Corbyn and Putin are now joining forces to argue that Russian Novichok was not used against the UK on 4 March 2018, which as we argued in an earlier update (above) is all due to secrecy by Prime Minister May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who refuses to learn the lesson of Prime Minister Tony Blair's official UK Government "dodgy dossier" on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, issued in 2002 to justify actions against dictator Saddam (I put that dossier on Internet Archive, linked here, to preserve it for history).  Sigh.  Let's go back over this again.  In 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair issued that dossier which excluded the scientific data, which was secret.  The weapons were never found after the Iraq war, so some people then pretended they didn't exist, despite the fact that Iraq provably had weapons stocks and didn't provide any evidence of destroying them at any point.  Now, if a regime has a stockpile and destroys it, it tries to publicise the fact that the stockpile was destroyed.  It doesn't justify a war on itself by keeping the destruction secret.  So the weapons were probably just hidden (somewhere in thousands of square miles of desert sand, needles in haystacks impossible to locate ever, like the tomb of Cleopatra).  The lesson is that you need to publish the evidence to prevent any controversy.  Instead of which, the UK Government has invited Russia to launch a propaganda war, claiming that Russia never made any Novichok, that Porton or MI5 are terrorists, etc.  This is now escalating the confrontation with a country which has many times the nuclear weapon stockpile of the UK, and far better civil defence shelters left over from the USSR, many of which have been re-equipped with new radiation meters and supplies.  We should not be allowing Putin and his Comrade Corbyn to feed fake news to the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror.  We need to publish the full facts, to avoid the obfuscation of secrecy.  In October 1962, Kennedy published the full evidence - top secret U2 spy plane photos - to the people of the world to justify his claims about the covert, lying delivery of Russian nuclear missiles to Cuba, just off the coast of America.  He proved his case with evidence, instead of relying on a lot of secretive bungling bureaucrats who make contradictory statements that fuel an escalation of the crisis.


UPDATE: 5 April 2018



Daily Express 5 April 2018 page 4 on calls for police to investigate Jeremy Corbyn racism supporters. Ex-Labour peer Lord Sugar, Lord Polak, Baroness Altmann, Lord Beecham, Lord Carlile, Baroness Deech, Lord Leigh, Lord Mitchell, Lord Palmer and Lord Turnbery have at last written a letter to the Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, requesting support against Corbyn's fans.  However, Corbyn is effectively appealing to Putin for support by rejecting claims that Russian aggression led to the Novichok attack on 4 March 2018, and Corbyn has also just attended a satirical Passover dinner, ridiculing not only Jews but when his friends shouted "f*** the police".  So the police is not really in a position to intervene now.  It is too late.  Anyone trying to prosecute or arrest racists who are followers of Corbyn must weigh up the risks of finding their front door smeared with Novichok, or facing retaliatory actions when Corbyn is PM.  The evidence for Comrade Corbyn's Russian spy involvement is known by all:


The Sun 21 February 2018 page 10 asks vital security questions that Corbyn calls "harassment" by the media: yet evidence exists that Corbyn is a threat to UK national security, and recent evidence proves that his Marxist criminal mindset is unaltered from his 1980s USSR spy period, when he was a stooge for Russian "divide and rule" attempts to pervert democracy in the UK.  Yet he is being given secret information on Novichok which is denied to Joe Public, and then he is abusing this position of trust to support Putin.  Corbyn refuses to release his East German Stasi police files for public viewing.  He is a secretive manipulator, a liar on nuclear weapons deterrence, and as we exposed in a earlier post, a shameful bigot towards civil defence to save lives in the wars that his kind refuse to deter around the world.  In Reagan's terms, he is becoming the focus of evil in world.

Update: 6 April 2018



Above: 1967 Civil Defence Instructors General and Supplementary Notes on "Protect and Survive" (then called "Civil Defence Handbook 10: Advising the Householder on Protection against nuclear attack"). In this open (unclassified) publication (sold by H.M. Stationery Office for 7 shillings and 6 pence), the training note G32:1, dated January 1967 (just a before the oversimplified handbook was ridiculed in the House of Commons for being idiotically simple, leading to the entire UK Civil Defence Corps being closed by Marxist PM Harold Wilson in March 1968), states: "There are many additions and alternatives which could be given to the advice contained in the handbook, but it is essential that this advice is not allowed to become over complicated by reference to too many refinements."  This is the key problem with groupthink government bureaucracy on nuclear weapons deterrence and civil defence.  It is oversimplified, and lacks credibility: it looks stupid.

Above: 1953 "Restricted" classified Civil Defence Instructors Notes containing secretive data on the adaptation of refuge rooms and WWII shelters for nuclear warfare (which at that time, in 1953, was not available to the public in unclassified Civil Defence Corps publications).  This was the information used when my father was an instructor in the Colchester Civil Defence Corps in the 1950s, with the result being an exploitation of the public "information vacuum" by Communist Party propaganda and ignorant scare mongering Marxist media who wanted Britain to disarm and to have no civilian protection against the Russian nuclear weapons first tested in 1949.  Data was declassified and publicised in the usual groupthink bureaucratic "too little, too late" manner, to appear like a bungled, very tardy propaganda response to wonderfully honest Marxist data on the impossible chance of anybody surviving a Russian attack.  In the meanwhile, nuclear weapons were rendered an incredible deterrent and Russia massacred civilians who protested for their freedom in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, and armed terrorists to try to bring down democratically elected governments across the world.

If anyone wants to know how the statistical evidence for how incredibly effective at lifesaving the simple, low cost indoor table shelter was in Britain in WWII, please click here (97.5% survival in completely demolished homes; vital knowledge for ongoing wars throughout the world whose deterrence nasty CND people like Corbyn resolutely oppose for political Marxist agenda reasons, while also opposing lifesaving low cost, practical, proved civil defence to maximise casualties).  If anyone wants to know just how effective 3-storey high above-ground (not underground!) earth and concrete shelters were at withstanding the 130 psi  blast just 1.4 mile from a 15 megaton nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954, please click here (not vapourised, didn't cease to exist, photographed and still there now).  If anyone wants to see original nuclear test data reports on gamma radiation and blast in low cost open trench and Anderson shelters justifying British civil defence manuals, please click here. If anyone wants to see how recent American research proves Penney's Hiroshima data on blast and radiation attenuation due to energy used up in causing damage (negating Glasstone's use of unobstructed desert terrain data for blast waves), please click here or here.

UPDATE (7 MAY 2018): EXTRACTS FROM U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S OPENNET REPORT 1177129, DECLASSIFIED SECRET-RESTRICTED DATA "AN INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS PRIMARY PHYSICS", BY MILES BARON, 2005, LOS ALAMOS REPORT LA-CP-05-0823

Above: unclassified extracts of data from An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons Primary Physics, Los Alamos, originally SECRET RESTRICTED DATA, by Miles Baron.  Note that the secret data Los Alamos are now using indicates that the fission of one atom of plutonium releases 220 MeV, ten percent more energy that the generic unclassified figure of 200 MeV stated in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons.  Other figures given include 16.6 kg for the critical mass of (chemically) stabilized delta-phase plutonium-239.  Such data is listed in unclassified publications, but there are generally a range of alternative numbers given from older declassified papers, so it is very interesting to see relatively up to date July 2005 data used in a secret-classified Los Alamos document.  In 2006, we published declassified versions of Glasstone's own originally secret weapon design summary (in two versions, with and without thermonuclear design supplements, dated 1963/4 and 1972, respectively), An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons, with PDFs of four versions linked here: 196219631972a and 1972b.  The critical masses and other nuclear weapon design data from Baron's 2005 report can therefore be directly compared to Glasstone 1963 and 1972, to see the evolution of knowledge!

Above: some interesting nuclear weapon design radiation data reports have been declassified to Opennet, with extensive deletions of secret data, the most important being the Sprint neutron bomb radiation output report (far right above): LA-6871-MS, L. C. Harrison et al., Output for the Sprint Warhead, Secret - Atomic Weapon Data Category Sigma 1, Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information.  This report (in classified form) is a complete set of calculated radiation outputs and debris motions from the first deployment of Samuel Cohen's "neutron bomb", the kiloton W66 Sprint warhead, which was for use in melting and thus deforming the fissile material of enemy incoming nuclear warheads as part of a clean, low yield nuclear ABM (anti-ballistic system).  This was prior to the main "neutron bomb controversy" when the Russians lied about the effects and capabilities of the neutron bomb via the World Peace Council's anti-nuclear CND Russian-front and other bigoted, nasty authority-not-fact pseudo-scientific dogmatic left wing fascists in the Western media and its "groupthink science", in order to maintain their ability to start WWIII with a concentrated tank invasion of Europe.  (While pretending to be "peace" lovers!)  Although this report LA-6871-MS was heavily "santized", nevertheless it still contains the most important data needed, an interesting list in Table I of the compositions and masses of all components in the Sprint missile itself, from the 1.5 kg silica phenolic ablative heat shielding nose cap (ablation of phenolic ablators on warhead noses are discussed in detail in Part 2 of Dolan's 1972 EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), to the 149 kg second stage motor.  This data is used in order to calculate the effect of the Sprint missile delivery system on the neutron and gamma radiation outputs from the warhead within it, because there is no time available in this last-ditch terminal phase interception ABM system to eject the warhead from its missile system, prior to detonating it!  We can easily use the tabulated data on masses and compositions in the declassified version of LA-6871-MS, in conjunction with the output spectrum of the enhanced neutron warhead published in Northrop's 1996 EM-1 handbook, and Dolan's schematic of the Sprint missile system in the 1972 edition of EM-1, to replicate the calculations in LA-6871-MS.  What is emerging is a great deal of very valuable data on the true effects of vitally important enhanced neutron warheads, both for ABM and to deter invasions by concentrated military forces.  The Sprint missile system is very important.

Further reading on Opennet:

1. Secret (now declassified) report detailing why we need the W79 enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons to deter Russian expansionism (LA-12063-MS, dated 1991), please click here for Opennet's PDF.

2. Secret (now declassified) Quarterly Progress to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Part 3 Weapons, by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July-September 1958 (PDF on Opennet linked here).  This summarises the interesting plan details concerning conversion of the nuclear weapons, including the clean weapons, tested at Bikini Atoll in Operation Hardtack, 1958, into stockpiled nuclear deterrents.  Earlier versions of these US AEC to the JCAE reports on weapons development in the 1950s were accidentally put on the shelves of Los Alamos National Laboratory's public library section and ended up in the news (they were quickly removed from the shelves).  This particular report discusses the 2000 lb stockpile production of the Class D Mark 28 thermonuclear weapon, the 1600 lb Mark 49 Y1 thermonuclear warhead for the IRBM, and the 2800 lb Class D missile warhead, the Mark 27.  It also mentions the early development effort to produce the Davy Crockett battlefield tactical weapon (finally proof tested in 1962 as the 0.02 kt, two point implosion Mark 54 weapon).  It also discusses, on page 3, the "clean" version of the W-41, adding: "Both versions [clean and dirty] will be produced."

This is a vital statement for debunking simple civil defense criticisms and common objections against credible nuclear deterrence (i.e. fallout mythology fear peddling by CND fascists).  OK, in the end General LeMay was anti-clean weapons (he wanted a bigger bang for the buck, using U238 pushers not inert tungsten or lead, as used respectively in the clean tests of Hardtack 1958 and Redwing 1956 at Bikini Atoll), and he managed to convince Eisenhower to deploy what he wanted in the megaton range, but nevertheless, clean weapons could be adopted today as a step towards the elimination of incredible (high collateral damage) nuclear deterrence, and a step towards the deterrence of not only a nuclear first strike, but also the conventional invasions that set off large wars which escalate (as in August 1945) to nuclear war.  Key clean bomb tests in the 1950s were Poplar, Zuni, and Navajo (click here for the proof test results of clean bombs eliminating fallout collateral damage).

The report also goes on to discuss, on pages 330-331, the thermonuclear weapons design progress which Britain disclosed to America at their first joint warhead design meeting on 25-27 August, 1958:

"During the first meeting it became obvious that the United Kingdom has achieved an advanced state of weapon research and development both in the fission and thermonuclear fields.  Moreover, it appeared that certain advances made by the United Kingdom would be of benefit to the United States [e.g. Britain detonated only spherical shaped secondaries in 1957-8 thermonuclear tests using the radiation channel filled with plastic foam to produce isotropic X-ray delivery to the spherical shape, whereas America concentrated on cylindrical secondaries whose dense metal pusher surfaces were ablated by soft x-rays "reflected" or rather re-radiated from just a layer of plastic foam on the inner surface of the outer case of the warhead].  Despite these achievements, however, the British apparently do not have an appreciation that plutonium produced from uranium subjected to higher burnup [i.e. with more neutron capture isotopes, nuclides Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242, Am-241, etc., some having higher spontaneous fission and thus higher neutron background that could pre-detonate slowly-assembled fissile cores] in their power reactors is usable in weapons.  This knowledge would be of great significance to their civilian power programs.  In addition, they have apparently not exerted major effort toward making their weapons one-point safe [i.e. invulnerable to accidents].

"Highlights of the second meeting, held in Albuquerque, September 15-17 [1958], are as follows:

"1. We provided the British with blueprints, material specifications, and relevant theoretical and experimental information related to our [Polaris submarine SLBM] XW-47 warhead, Mark 28, 44, 45, and 48 warheads, and ... for our TX-41 and TX-46 weapons now under development.

"2. The British provided similar information on their high-yield fission bomb, now in stockpile, 2,200 pound thermonuclear bomb, small ... device, two boosted fission designs, planned 1,500 pound thermonuclear weapon, and proposed 6 inch gun [nuclear canon shell] device.

"3. Both parties discussed in detail neutron sources for initiators, high explosive specifications, yields and designs, and mechanical and electrical components.

"We have several observations resulting from these meetings.  The British ... have tested radiation-implosion, two-stage devices corresponding to our knowledge in 1954-55. ... This [an implosion design] is a new technique to United States implosion designers and holds a great deal of interest for us. ... there are specific developments which the United Kingdom scientists have made which hold a great deal of interest for us and which might offer advantages in our weapons systems."

This limited example of USA-UK collaboration to halt the USSR and Warsaw Pact beautifully illustrates the progress which could be achieved in ending the bloodshed of conventional warfare by collaboration for peace, not the deluded arms control/disarmament farce which failed to halt bloodshed since 1945, but a collaboration between different weapons labs to make more credible nuclear deterrents which can halt aggression, invasion, and war with less collateral damage, and this will finally bring real peace through security, i.e low cost credible defense of democratic freedom.

5 July 2018 Update on new Novichok nerve agent poisoning victims in Amesbury, 8 miles north of Salisbury at 10:15 and 15:30 on Saturday 30 June 2018


30 June 2018 Amesbury Novichok A234 poisoning timeline from DAILY MAIL.


Dawn Sturgess, 44, and partner Charlie Rowley, 45, have reportedly had their hands contaminated with high concentrations of Novichok A234, the same substance smeared on the door knob of Sergei Skripal, 67, in March.  The new poisoning victims have reportedly - on the basis of the high concentrations of Novichok - handled the original Novichok A234 container used to carry the agent from Moscow to Salisbury by Putin's spies in March.  Naturally, they discarded before taking a flight back to Russia, and they did not put it in a bin (which they knew might have been searched after the poisoning was discovered).  The original container would not be a test tube labelled clearly "Novichok A234", but something camouflaged as an innocent object.  All other contaminated areas have been decontaminated by the weather (rainfall, wind, etc.) or by the decontamination efforts of police and the military in March.  What has happened is that the Russian spies took a container of nerve agent through customs into England of a form which would not arouse suspicion.  A cavity in the back of a wrist watch, or inside a USB memory stick, or inside a laptop, phone or tablet, would be the most likely locations (e.g. you can plug a half-size 2.5 inch HDD-replacing SSD laptop, leaving ample room in the half-empty SSD enclosure for a pack of Novichok).  After the nerve agent was removed, the entire object would be discarded.  Since it had not been decontaminated, and might have remained inside a bag hidden in undergrowth at the edge of a field or park, it would not have been washed clean internally by the weather, and could still be a hazard.

Someone then finds it, takes it home, charges it and uses it.  Ms Sturgess collapsed at 10:15 am on Saturday 30 June 2018, and Mr Rowley collapsed at the same flat in Amesbury at 3:30pm that same day.  Clearly that had recently discovered the missing Novichok A234 container, without realising the danger or its true significance.  It is not speculative to argue that after all this time, the object causing this severe contamination of their hands must have been the original container used by the Russians, and that this object would now be located in the Mr Rowley's flat in Amesbury.  The fact that she fell ill first suggests that she was contaminated significantly first, or to a greater extent, than Mr Rowley. Her home is reportedly in a hostel in Salisbury, where she may have found the A234 container.

The Porton Down chemical warfare centre should be able to identify the original container from the high concentration of A234, i.e. the quantitative contamination density on it (micrograms of A234 per square metre), just as in 2006 the teapot poisoned with Po-210 was identified from the concentration of alpha activity (in becquerels per square metre) that it contained.  This is completely at odds with the gormless Russian propaganda being restated by pig-ignorant "science reporters" on Channel 4 "news", a front for dishonesty and delusions.  (They are currently repeating Russian "questions" as to whether Britain has created this latest poisoning to take away credit from Russian's glorious hosting of the football World Cup, despite such "questions" being classic Russian propaganda tricks.)  What is interesting is whether finding the actual container will indicate:

(1) The total amount of A234 originally smuggled into Britain (just measure its volume!),
(2) The people responsible, because there might be fingerprints on it from before it was opened: think from the mindset of the assassin by supposing you are Putin's agent and you carry the poison through customs into Britain (inside your specially modified watch, phone, laptop, or ipad).  That object will have fingerprints on it, because the poison is sealed inside aluminium foil (or plastic), to allow you to safely carry it.  You are not going to be wearing gloves all the way from Moscow to Salisbury, which would be unnecessary and suspicious!  You might well wear gloves when you finally open the back of the watch or the back of the laptop or USB stick to remove the poison pack, which you tear open at the front door of Skripal's house, apply it to the doorknob, and then place it into a rucksack or bag, followed by gloves.  The container may still have traces of fingerprints on it.  Put another way, if the object had been doused in petrol and burned to cinders to carefully destroy the evidence, then it is unlikely that Sturgess would have touched it.  If they didn't bother to destroy the container, maybe they didn't bother to scrub the fingerprints off it, either. Far more likely, the agents smeared Novichok A234 on the Skripal's door knob in March wearing gloves, then put the container into a rucksack or other bag with the gloves, zipped it up, and then dumped the whole thing in a the long grass of a park in Salisbury or Amesbury where it was discovered on Saturday morning by Dawn Sturgess who took it, or part of its contents, home and was contaminated.  If the object is bulky, there is a chance of tracking where it has been using standard forensic techniques.  (It is known for certain that both Sturgess and Rowley visited a park, Queen Elizabeth Gardens, in Salisbury on Friday 29 June 2018, but that is not necessarily where they found the contaminated object.)
(3) Whether the Novichok A234 was smuggled in two precursor chemical parts as a "binary" agent, whereby two relatively harmless chemicals are mixed together to form lethal substance, just before it is used.  This option is a complete unknown, but it might have been used in case customs officials opened and inspected one (or both) of the precursor substances.

16 July 2018 UPDATE: NOVICHOK REPORTEDLY SPRAYED FROM PERFUME BOTTLE

It has now been reported by Matthew Rowley, brother of Novichok casualty Charlie Rowley, that the source of the Novichok A234 was a perfume bottle discovered by Mr Rowley (who is still alive and now conscious in hospital, and who has spoken about the events with his brother).  If correct, Ms Sturgess (who was hospitalised before Mr Rowley) received a larger dose from spraying her wrist with Novichok in the belief it was a harmless perfume.

Mr Rowley reportedly discovered the perfume bottle (which the police found in his house and sent to Porton for analysis), and he took longer to be taken ill, and to a lesser (non-fatal) degree.  Ms Sturgess was affected sooner and died, presumably as a result of exposure to a much larger dose of Novichok, as a result of spraying the perfume bottle on her skin.  The basic standard treatments for Novichok at present are atropine to relax muscles (just enough to keep the eye pupils at normal 2-4mm diameter, instead of contracted to points which is what nerve agent does due to continued muscular contraction), sedatives to relax the brain, and an artificial respirator machine (with tubed air into the lungs) to take over breathing if the atropine dose needed is so great that the muscles are completely unable to function for normal breathing.  Clearly, Ms Sturgess had such a large dose that this treatment, which succeeded with the previous Novichok cases, failed due to heart failure; her son Ewan has reported that Ms Sturgess's sister was with her when she died and "her heart slowed down and she just gave in."  (Thus, possibly, a heart-and-lung machine may help in such high dose cases.)

If these reports about the source being a perfume bottle are correct (they are based on a visitor to Mr Rowley in hospital), then as we suggested in the previous update (above, item (1) ), the police will be able to determine the total amount of Novichok from the size of the perfume bottle, and the purity of the residue inside the bottle.  It is possible that the perfume bottle was smuggled through customs in hand luggage if it was less than 50ml (larger bottles of liquid are banned from hand luggage, in case they contain explosives or acids for aircraft hijacks or sabotage).  It could also have been smuggled in within hold luggage.  If so, the Novichok was not in binary form (two inert precursors which are mixed to form the deadly nerve agent).

The police are having difficulties due to the heat exhaustion problems of working in hazmat chemical protection suits indoors in the UK's exceptionally hot weather at present.  However, due to hydrolysis decay by rain outdoors since March, and the low volatility (i.e. long persistence) of Novichok (which is a skin threat to a far greater extent than an inhalation threat), gloves are probably all that is really needed for outdoor searches.  The correct analogy is that while the more volatile nerve agents evaporate easily and therefore constitute an inhalation danger in enclosed spaces, Novichok A234 is more like a thick oil or grease which does not evaporate rapidly, and is therefore more of a danger to the skin than to the lungs, like VX which had to be deployed as a liquid droplet spray, not a vapour.

As already explained in the previous update, the Novichok A234 in a perfume bottle would have been sprayed on the door handle of the Skripal's house by someone wearing gloves for protection, who would then immediately have stowed the perfume and the gloves into some kind of container, possibly a rucksack or handbag, before discarding them.

The perfume bottle nozzle would obviously be contaminated; although Novichok A234 in undiluted form is too viscus - like treacle or honey - to spray from a perfume bottle, a non-water based volatile solvent/thinner could easily have been added, like a small quantity of petrol or alcohol.  This would have allowed the Novichok to have been sprayed, and the solvent would then quickly evaporate from the door handle, leaving behind a thin layer of pure Novichok A234.  Thus, the exact place where Mr Rowley found the perfume bottle may lead to further discoveries of evidence (bag, gloves, maybe the container in which the perfume bottle was smuggled in), as well as helping to map the route taken by the assassin after spraying.  If we envisage the sequence of events from the perspective of the assassin taking safety precautions it is as follows:

1. Assassin arrives at Skripal house with Novichok in perfume bottle held in some kind of secure container (an assassin would not want a perfume bottle of Novichok loose in a handbag or pocket, in case it leaked or more likely, some movement caused the depression of the nozzle button on the top!).

2. Assassin puts on gloves, then takes out the perfume bottle of Novichok from its container (box, plastic bag, rucksack, or original transit container).

3. Wearing glove, assassin uses perfume bottle to spray A234 and alcohol mixture on door handle, where alcohol evaporates to leave pure A234 residue.

4. Assassin replaces perfume bottle into container, along with glove (probably removed by peeling it "inside out" to avoid contamination of the other hand by any droplets on outside of glove), and places that into the container.

5. Assassin discards container in shrubs or long grass in a park early in the morning or late at night, to avoid drawing attention to themselves (as might occur if they tried to burn the evidence).  They might not want to place the evidence in a town centre bin, where a police search may find it quickly, and where CCTV cameras may identify the assassin easily.

It is also possible that due to cold weather in March, the assassin had gloves on the whole time and simply carried to perfume bottle in one hand, and kept it in the gloved hand after spraying it, in order to avoid unpacking and repacking the bottle in front of the Skripal's front door (in case seen by a neighbour or passer by).  In this case, the perfume bottle might have been dumped by itself or with the gloves in the park.  Either way, the discovery of the delivery container will be a major step forward in understanding how the attack was accomplished, particularly as the survivor who reportedly found the perfume bottle will be able to identify exactly where it was found, allowing a pin-point search for any other objects which may still exist in that vicinity, like gloves, bags, etc.

Update: 25 July 2018 on Novichok A234 container description by Charlie Rowley

Novichok victim Charlie Rowley has been released from hospital and has given an interview to ITV news in which he has confirmed that he discovered the Novichok bottle, apparently in a sealed, unopened packet: a 3 x 3 inch size box, 1/2 inch thick, containing a glass bottle in a cellophane wrapper with a dispenser separate.  He accidentally spilt some on his hand but washed it off.  His partner sprayed it on her wrist, however, and then rubbed her wrists together, falling ill 15 minutes later.  She did not wash it off:


Above: Charlie Rowley, 45, who discovered the Novichok A234 disguised as a perfume bottle, and was poisoned by it, says he found it actually looking new and unopened in a 3 x 3 inch x 1/2 inch thick box, wrapped in a cellophane wrapper, containing a separate spray dispenser top which had to be inserted.  He accidentally spilled some of the oily, unscented liquid on his hand while inserting the spray top on the bottle, but he washed it off his hands and so received only a small, survivable dose (the oily liquid is only slowly absorbed through skin).  His partner Dawn Sturgess, 44, sprayed it on one wrist and then rubbed her wrists together, but did not wash it off.  She fell ill just 15 minutes later due to that lethal dose, which required so much atropine to counter muscular contraction that it led to lethal heart failure, despite artificial ventilation (Charlie took longer to fall ill, due to his smaller dose).  She died on 8 July.  If this was a "spare" unused Novichok poisoned "perfume" pack, then Russian assassin unit had more than one smuggled into the UK.

UPDATE: 3 August 2018 on Novichok perfume bottle location and fascism by Corbyn

It has been reported that Novichok victim Charley Rowley believes he found the discarded Russian assassin's Novichok perfume bottle pack that killed Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury in two industrial waste containers by The Cloisters Pub in the city centre, which have now been taken to the chemical and biological defence establishment at Porton for analysis and testing.  Normal bins are emptied weekly by the council, but industrial waste containers can be left to fill up for months before removal.  In other news, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who alleged that Russia did not make the Novichok attack on Britain, has now released an Iranian TV interview video praising as his "brothers" the Hamas terrorists who murdered 600 innocent people.  Corbyn continues claiming that his support for the USSR and Warsaw Pact human rights abusers in the 1980s, Hamas, the IRA and other terrorists is in the name of peace or freedom of speech, but mainstream Jews have complained that he is a hater of the Jewish homeland of Israel and that his words are the opposite of his actions.  His disgusting CND lies on nuclear weapons and civil defence prevent peace and freedom of speech.

UPDATE: 5 August 2018 on Novichok assassination breakthrough

Police have discovered that the Novichok nerve agent used in a perfume spray bottle to spray the door handle of the home of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on Saturday 3 March 2018 may have been prepared in a toilet block in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens, Salisbury, where low level Novichok contamination has now been discovered.  A spare spray bottle discarded in containers near The Cloisters Pub contaminated Charlie Rowley and killed Dawn Sturgess on 8 July.  From these pin-pointed locations on a map, in relation to the Skripal's house, the police will be able to deduce the route taken by assassins, and then use this route for data reduction, to help focus attention on appropriate CCTV footage to identify the attackers.

82 Comments:

At 4:28 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

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At 12:54 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pro-Russia propaganda, but a different and (partially) logical viewpoint nonetheless:
https://www.rt.com/news/421591-uk-produce-novichok-agent/
The UK government presumes that (a the type of poison used was invented in Russia/USSR. (b only Russia can create this kind of poison, and then (c Russia did the poisoning.

This might well be the case. However, if "Novichok Agents" are so secret, then how can Britain know one when the see it? They would have had to be given a confirmed sample from Russia to compare against the nerve agents used on Skripal, or else have learned (either openly or by espionage) the composition from Russia.

In any case, the UK government is either unable to prove the poison originated in Russia, or perhaps they too have a good understanding of the substance.

Now, knowing how to recognize a substance is not the same as knowing how to create it, but the two often go hand in hand. If an advanced chemist knows the molecular composition and structure of a compound, they can often find ways to make it from other available compounds. If the British government is able to identify Novichok agents as positively as they claim, then they are probably able to chemically synthesize them, too, just like the Russians. I'm not saying that this is a false-flag attack, but this possibility should not be ruled out.

Whoever did the poisoning, whatever poison they used, however they delivered it, whatever the reason, and whatever the political consequences will be, a good supply of gas masks (and some atropine or whatever is the appropriate antidote) is not a bad idea!

 
At 12:55 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...


What is, IMO, is the weapon system detailed in Los Alamos report LA-9004. The problem, is that it plans on targeting individual tanks (and small groups of tanks) with nuclear warheads. Even North Korea has 5000 tanks. Russia has 20000:
https://www.globalfirepower.com/armor-tanks-total.asp
Say that each of these weapons destroys an average of 5 tanks (some will get less, but some will get many more) Now we need to come up with perhaps 1000 of these nukes, all designed for this specific purpose. And we need them fast! Now, with a more sensible approach, you can have have boarder walls and guards, and maybe a few tactical nuclear weapons, designed to be used on large, dense groups of tanks. Once tanks and personnell disperse into smaller groups, or begin travelling in narrow columns, nukes are no longer a sensible option. A better one, in my opinion would be a strong "home guard" or "citizen's guard," to go with a civil defense program. You could have maybe 2-10% of the population who train periodically, have guns, etc., but are not enlisted in the military in the conventional sense of the term. They can be farmers, factory workers, doctors, or anything else in a society. They don't have to be kept in barracks during times of peace. But if a war starts, they can be ready to fight. Such a force can provide cheap, effective deterrence against an invading force using small arms, and machine guns, cannon, remotely controlled mines and small rockets to attack enemy vehicles and large groups of personnel.

The reason why enormous numbers of small nuclear weapons are impractical is simply an economy of scale. It takes almost as much resources to produce a 30 ton yield warhead as it does to produce a 30 kiloton warhead. The yield proposed in LA-9004 is not given, but it appears to be very low. If Los Alamos is still ignoring attenuation by buildings, the claim of it only "rattling windows" at 300 meters would suggest a yield under .05 kt. With enough blast attenuation, however, even a weapon in the range of a few hundred kt may only "rattle" windows at 300 meters. However, the way the article kept saying it was such a low yield, and would hardly do any blast damage to a tank at 25 m, etc, suggests a warhead below 10 kt in yield. At 10 kt, approximately 500 grams of fissile material are fissioned (or 2.5 grams at .05 kt), but this material is used up throughout a much larger core, of perhaps 3-6 kg mass. This inefficient enough to make this defense impractical.

 
At 3:16 pm, Blogger nige said...

"Once tanks and personnel disperse into smaller groups, or begin travelling in narrow columns, nukes are no longer a sensible option."

Please remember that the whole point of the neutron bomb is to DETER concentrated personnel/truck/tank/mobile missile launcher invasions, to PREVENTING invasions of the 1914 Belgium sort that set off WWI and the 1939 Poland sort that set off WWII.

We want to DETER war, by PREVENTING APPLICATION of the "principle of concentration of force." As long as we also have handheld anti-tank rockets for dispersed attacks and thus properly defended border walls (unlike the imaginary boundary between Eastern Ukraine and Russia in recent years), then we can hold off WWIII. Nuclear weapons are used to credibly deter war, not to actually blow things up.

"It takes almost as much resources to produce a 30 ton yield warhead as it does to produce a 30 kiloton warhead."

If we NEED to avert collateral damage risks in areas where civilians live JUST beside borders over which armies can invade, then we might need very low yields to CREDIBLY DETER war. The "bigger bank for the buck" argument is moot if the bigger bang is incredible as a deterrent!

Broken windows (which can occur down to about 0.1 psi peak overpressure, if face-on to the blast) don't matter if the wind pressure behind the blast winds behind the shock front are too slow to accelerate the glass fragments to injuring velocities.

There was a massive CND and BBC trickery campaign in the Cold War, in which the impacts of high velocity flying glass from 10 psi peak overpressure on pumpkins placed behind the windows (with no "duck and cover", blinds, curtains or clothing protection at all, naturally!) was deliberately shown when the commentator discussed how far "windows are broken". Shop windows were sometimes broken in Las Vegas during kiloton nuclear tests 70 miles away, but the fragments did not constitute a hazard. The glass was simply cracked, falling with gravitation vertically, and remained beside the window, instead of being blasted into people as occurs at closer rangers, at high wind pressure.

Clearly, therefore, the distance to which the danger from flying glass extends is only a fraction of that at which glass panes facing ground zero can be "broken". At 1 psi peak overpressure, the maximum blast winds are only 70 miles/hour and glass fragments will be accelerated to lower velocities than that! Experiments prove that even ordinary clothing provides substantial protection, and any person standing behind a windows will instinctively turn away or close their eyes due to painfully bright flash. If the flash is attenuated by heavy curtains, those will stop or slow most of the flying glass, too!

If I can just add this: a really hard program of research may produce a better neutron bomb, cleaner and cheaper in terms of fissile material. At present, the low fission yield stage means a very low percentage of that energy is radiated as X-rays and available to compress and heat the secondary (fusion) stage. What is needed is additional energy coupling of other forms of energy to improve the efficiency of the fusion stage in low yield thermonuclear weapons, and as explained in an earlier post, that can be done using proof tested principles of electromagnetic pulse generation via magnetic flux compression in a coil around the fission primary stage, the energy pulse of which can be fed into magnetic field generator coils around the nearby fusion stage (just as has been done, for short duration pulses, in some "peaceful nuclear fusion reactor" experiments). Given research, something like this could cheapen and improve low yield neutron bombs.

 
At 3:44 pm, Blogger nige said...

"However, if "Novichok Agents" are so secret, then how can Britain know one when the see it? They would have had to be given a confirmed sample from Russia to compare against the nerve agents used on Skripal, or else have learned (either openly or by espionage) the composition from Russia."

There is a large amount of surprisingly updated military use information on nerve gas warfare in the 2014 Russian civil defense manual, which I put on Internet Archive and linked to in the recent post at http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/1929-photo-of-dr-samuel-glasstone-for.html


E.g., see https://archive.org/stream/RUSSIANNUCLEARWEAPONSEFFECTSCOUNTERMEASURES1960TO2014/RUSSIAN%20NUCLEAR%20WEAPONS%20EFFECTS%20COUNTERMEASURES%201960%20TO%202014#page/n881/mode/2up

For example, please see their tables on pages 57-58, linked here, which are far more detailed and militaristic than than anything in their old USSR civil defence manuals on nerve gases. This indicates recent research on this subject by the Kremlin, before than 2014 book which coincided with their use of gas via Assad in Syria and also the invasion of Crimea, etc.

There are also links to various references from defecting Russian scientists on Novichok, here. Let me explain, please: a Russian scientist defects and says "Russia has made a new Novichok nerve gas that is x times more powerful than VX, and here is the formula (waving a piece of paper) for you to check what I say!" We check the chemical compound in a very sophisticated massively parallel processor 3D chemical molecule computer simulation to see exactly what its properties are, compared to known nerve gases like VX. We then validate the claim, strong evidence that it is true, without any risk of being duped by lies (or being killed by accident). Simple.

 
At 3:52 pm, Blogger nige said...

BTW, Porton Down has been strapped of cash (unlike Putin's scientists!) since the Cold War ended in 1992. They did not even have enough personnel to deal with the decontamination of the recent attack, without getting help from the Army. We are in a terrible state regarding civil defense and military preparedness against Russia, North Korea (which is probably just playing for time in agreeing to a Summit with Trump, like Iraq did for years), China, and terrorists. The government has only authorised an emergency £60 million cash injection into Porton Down after the latest attack happened; too little, too late. We've known for years that nerve gas has been used by the Russians and their allies in the Middle East, e.g. Syria. We've done very little, just spying, no concrete efforts to deter, stop or defend ourselves in war. Yes, a few new gas masks for soldiers to replace the old S10's, but very little for retaliation!

 
At 4:05 pm, Blogger nige said...

Information on Russia's Novichok program came from people such as the Russia Chemical War scientist Vil Mirzayanov. The thing is, there was very little interest in this until the latest attack. Now Russia is denying everything. It's absurd, because independent experts have verified the properties of the chemical compounds Mirzayanov and other dissidents from Putin have disclosed! They didn't just write down chemical formulae out of their heads as a gimmick. These are really lethal weapons, and we know Russia was dishonest and lied about Po-210 poisoning in London 2006, dishonestly used unmarked military vehicles in invading the Ukraine, etc. The whole obsession of people like commie "socialist" Jeremy Corbyn with believing Russian propaganda, or asking them for more of it (which will come if we send them samples in a travesty of diplomacy), is crazy. I'm all for talking to and negotiating with Putin, but for God's sake let's use gunboat diplomacy and re-arm ourselves to make Putin more sensible. Power is the language he loves; he sees weakness as a joke.

 
At 5:36 pm, Blogger nige said...

I just want to address some specific flaws in your suggestion:

"Now, with a more sensible approach, you can have have boarder walls and guards, and maybe a few tactical nuclear weapons, designed to be used on large, dense groups of tanks. Once tanks and personnell disperse into smaller groups, or begin travelling in narrow columns, nukes are no longer a sensible option. A better one, in my opinion would be a strong "home guard" or "citizen's guard," to go with a civil defense program. You could have maybe 2-10% of the population who train periodically, have guns, etc., but are not enlisted in the military in the conventional sense of the term. They can be farmers, factory workers, doctors, or anything else in a society. They don't have to be kept in barracks during times of peace. But if a war starts, they can be ready to fight. Such a force can provide cheap, effective deterrence against an invading force using small arms, and machine guns, cannon, remotely controlled mines and small rockets to attack enemy vehicles and large groups of personnel."

I like all your ideas, but not nuclear disarmament! My problems with this are that:

(1) We still need tactical nuclear weapons to make enemy force disperse, i.e. to prevent the sort of concentrated Blitzkrieg that overcame the Belgium defences in 1914 and the Polish in 1939. It's no good saying that once they disperse, we don't need any nuclear bombs.

We (ironically) need nuclear weapons to make the enemy force disperse in the first place, so nuclear weapons are always going to be necessary in order to keep a war conventional by forcing the enemy to use dispersion tactics which enable us to use nun-nuclear tactics.

(2) Your whole approach of civilian mobilization into military conscripts when an invasion is threatened is what was behind the crisis instability of August 1914, when millions of conscripts and defense volunteers were recalled, kitted out with guns and uniforms, and sent to the fronts (borders) by trains or on foot. The problem is that this massive conventional mobilization system was incredibly expensive in logistics and also was perceived by neighbors as a threat! You know, if a country mobilizes huge conventional forces on the border of some country, people in that country want to do likewise, and you get exponentially escalating crisis instability. The tension rises, the economy is busted and war fever breaks out because of fears that he who strikes first has the advantage of surprise. There is also a fear that the logistics needed will run out or devastate the economy. Any accidental gunshot is then perceived as the starting pistol for the war.

So the whole problem of conventional weapons mobilization is that it really doesn't deter war, but makes war more likely. As Thatcher put it in the final episode of the 1989 documentary "The Nuclear Age":

"After all, two world wars have shown that conventional weapons are NOT enough to deter war, and if we want a war-free Europe, we must continue to have a nuclear deterrent."

Conventional weapons are so bulky compared to nuclear weapons, that mobilization preparations (bringing troops to frontiers, etc.) are obvious and cause war hysteria, that often triggers off war on any pretext (like an accidental shooting). Nuclear weapons, by contrast, are the ONLY THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN PROVED TO DETER WWIII. End of story.

 
At 5:59 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Let me explain, please: a Russian scientist defects and says "Russia has made a new Novichok nerve gas that is x times more powerful than VX, and here is the formula (waving a piece of paper) for you to check what I say!" "We check the chemical compound in a very sophisticated massively parallel processor 3D chemical molecule computer simulation..." Then British weapon laboratories probably could indeed create their own batch of Novichok, if they were so inclined. I'm not saying that they DID, just that they COULD if they wanted to.

The simplest explanation to Skripal's poisoning is that it is Russia, making an example of a defected spy, saying "Don't make an enemy of the Russian government; where ever you are, we will find a way to get even with you. We know how to assassinate people with complete impunity. And, we have some mean military weapons (nerve gas can obviously be either for war or assassination, depending on how much is applied) too, so don't even think about declaring war on us."

What I said about broken windows has nothing to do with whether broken glass is lethal. I was just saying the yield they planned could be large, maybe even a few hundred kt, if blast attenuation was taken into account in LA-9004. If, as usual, the document is ignoring this effect, they are likely talking about something under .05 kt. I also know that the idea is credible deterrence, so that you hopefully don't have to blow anything up. All I said is that this idea of making nuclear weapons to irradiate one tank at a time is foolish. If you would run out of them before you have stopped the invasion, then the enemy might decide to take the loss. But, if you have a military system that will annihilate most of the invading force, that is more credible. If they are in a city and concentrated in one area, it might be best to target that one area with a larger yield. If the whole place is full of enemy tanks, you need to cover it all with lethal effects, and that is going to take a lot more warheads using low yields than high yields (by which I still mean only a few kt). If they are dispersed, then they shouldn't be targeted with nukes at all. Other means should be used. Of course, all of this is the PLAN, which you have ready in order to DETER an invasion which would require it being put into action. It's not so much an issue of collateral damage; the main danger from such a device is initial radiation, there would be little damage to buildings, and citizens could go into air raid shelters or be evacuated prior to the battle. The issue is how many of these things you can make, in a cheap and timely manner.

 
At 6:00 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"If I can just add this: a really hard program of research may produce a better neutron bomb, cleaner and cheaper in terms of fissile material." Yes. But that will be a very, very hard research program indeed, and possibly a fruitless one. Currently, if you make the fissile core in the primary too small, you won't have any yield, not even a ton equivalent, to channel to the secondary. The only way to change that is with better compression of the primary core, and systems with better compression tend to be much bigger. If you have a quarter of the mass, (say, 750 gm instead of 3 kg), you likely have to reduce it to a quarter of the surface area, which means the radius must shrink by 50%. If you reduce the mass by 16 (and now you are starting to get passable efficiency at low yields) you have to reduce the area to 1/16, reduce radius by 75%, and increase density 4 times. To change this pattern, I think the only options will be (a find a fissile material that absorbs neutrons along a shorter path at any given density (b find a material which produces many more neutrons during fission, (c find a material which deflects neutrons very effectively in thin layers, without absorbing them (d devise a way to use a moderator (this has been tried already at Upshot Knothole Ruth and Ray; slowing down the neutrons reduced the speed of the reaction, leading to less fission occurring before disassembly of the core) or (e find something entirely different which is capable of initiating fusion, like spherical implosion in metastable metallic hydrogen, with a metallic deuterium core, or a way of creating antimatter efficiently. A small device capable of initiating fusion without a fissile primary state would be truly revolutionary, and has been researched for a long time. This link provides some preliminary estimations of the effects of such a device:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071

Anyhow, keep up the good work. You're providing the data needed to implement civil defense, and the news suggesting that we need it. Now, it's just a matter of getting bigoted people in government to listen!

 
At 7:40 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

One more thing: When I talked about a "strong home gaurd", I did not mean people being conscripted, and mobilized to the front lines. I was thinking more along the lines of people who are ready to fight FOLLOWING INVASION, but not always on duty during peacetime. This type of "reserve" can be technically part of the conventional military, as in the US National Guard
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_States) or as a group of people who are supplied with training and weapons via the government, and would take orders during a time of crisis, but are not officially part of the military:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Guard_(United_Kingdom)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps) (although these were very poorly trained and equipped, but still an example)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkssturm)
Regardless of whether these units are considered part of the conventional military or not, they do not have to be "mobilized." they do not have to be kept in barracks during peace. They can continue working normal jobs in factories, fields, offices, hospitals, while only training periodically. You can't rely on this type of defence entirely, but it is a good back-up for the conventional forces, following an invasion. Walls, powerful weapons, bunkers, etc can all be overcome if an invading force finds a way to disperse, or circumvent a barrier like the Maginot lines. Having a third line of defense makes ANY type of invasion seem much less attractive.

To be clear, I am suggesting something like the following in the case of Britain:
Gas masks and protection against nukes (evacuation, household shelters, public shelters, etc.) for everyone
Civil Defence training for everyone
This equipment and training could probably be given for under $200 per person, even with modern inflation. In the early days of ABM defense, the cost of providing bomb shelters was considered more cost-effective than ABM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus#Perfect_or_nothinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus#Perfect_or_nothing

For Britain, I'm assuming the cost for shelters will be $13B
Rifles (600$ in mass), ammunition (1000rds, under 500$) and a small amount of instruction for training, not the entire basic training used by the army (2000$) plus, 2000 rounds ($1000) for fighting. Some expenses (like more training equipment) can be paid for by volunteer members, if they are so inclined. Anyhow, I estimate that the gov't cost in getting a "citizen soldier", trained and equipped enough to do anything, is probably around $5000, or $15B to get 3 million dispersed "guerilla" or "stay-behind" fighters.

Anti-tank warfare: Potassium Chlorate is an explosive chemical used in ww1. It can be produced using approximately 31 kwh of electricity per kilogram, for a cost (at $.20/kwh) of $6/kg. it is ideal for decentralized production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hAct2dmT4

I propose 300,000 separate 100 watt chlorate units, at a cost of $150 a piece, capable of creating 28 kg/yr of product for a total of 4200 large anti-tank remotely operated mines per year. The initial cost would be $45M, and 50.4M/year after that.

In summary, $13B for civil defense, $15B into a "citizen soldier" or "militia" program, and perhaps $200M to add decentralized anti-tank weapons in great quantities. I have to stress that this needs to be IN ADDITION to perhaps as few as 2000 new tactical nuclear weapons such as anti-ship, anti-submarine, and enhanced radiation, with yields of between 1 and 100 kt. $29B is a lot of money, but it is still less than the current UK defense budget. Over a period of a few years, Britain could create an extremely strong credible deterrent, consisting of combined nuclear, conventional, and paramilitary forces, as well as civil defense.

 
At 10:07 am, Blogger nige said...

"Currently, if you make the fissile core in the primary too small, you won't have any yield, not even a ton equivalent, to channel to the secondary. The only way to change that is with better compression of the primary core, and systems with better compression tend to be much bigger. ..."

This is completely wrong! You haven't grasped the whole point at all! You can make the primary yield ANYTHING YOU LIKE, even with existing technology (this is WELL ESTABLISHED, and the article and numbers you give are complete obfuscation), by adjusting the time between firing the implosion system and firing the neutron pulse generator. This is how you can get 20 tons of TNT yield from a W54, tested in 1962 successfully. This is totally unclassified, and you are writing inaccurate stuff, and you link to a paper by a propaganda writer who hates credible nuclear deterrence and was debunked by a British military nuclear weapons effects expert for driting lies in the New Scientist in 1986, as we showed in a post back in 2006. There is NO PROBLEM with getting small primary yields.

As I stated in my comment above, the ONLY issue is quite different to what you claim.

Uncompressed but in a good tamper of beryllium, about 4.4 kg of Pu239 is the critical mass. The effective critical mass decreases as the square of the compressed density, so an implosion system which doubles the density, means you can use roughly 1.1 kg of Pu239 to get a critical mass during implosion. If fission was 100%, this would give you almost 20 kt yield, but you can choose anything you like, because the compressed core rebounds outwards as the shock wave reached the middle of the core, and rebounds. By firing the neutron pulse generator at a selected time for a given configuration during the "rebound" of the core, you can achieve any yield you like, 2 tons of TNT, 20 tons of TNT, 0.5 kiloton, etc.

So that is not the problem. You are NOT reducing the amount of fissile material below about 1 kg of Pu239 to reduce the yield; you are instead increasing the delay time between firing the detonators and firing the neutron generator tube.

Now, as I explained above, the issue is then how much fission yield you need which is high if you are using X-rays for coupling, but will be REDUCED if you utilise other means as well, to make the coupling more efficient. You ignored what I wrote:

" At present, the low fission yield stage means a very low percentage of that energy is radiated as X-rays and available to compress and heat the secondary (fusion) stage. What is needed is additional energy coupling of other forms of energy to improve the efficiency of the fusion stage in low yield thermonuclear weapons, and as explained in an earlier post, that can be done using proof tested principles of electromagnetic pulse generation via magnetic flux compression in a coil around the fission primary stage, the energy pulse of which can be fed into magnetic field generator coils around the nearby fusion stage (just as has been done, for short duration pulses, in some "peaceful nuclear fusion reactor" experiments). Given research, something like this could cheapen and improve low yield neutron bombs."

We can reduce the primary fission stage yield in a neutron bomb IF WE INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE COUPLING. The expense problem is due to tritium, not plutonium. By increasing efficiency of compression, you need less tritium for similar fusion yield!

 
At 10:16 am, Blogger nige said...

Obviously by "you can choose anything you like" in my comment refers to the range of yields available up to the highest efficiency achievable, maybe 50% with a large implosion system, spherically symmetric. I.e., 10 kt yield for 1.1 kg of Pu239, or so.

The great ADVANTAGE of using inefficient fission weapons (very small percentage of fission, i.e. 20 tons of TNT from 1.1 kg of Pu239 is a fission efficiency of only about 0.1%), is that you can use VERY COMPACT linear implosion systems, which is how the W79 neutron bomb diameter was small enough to fit into a shell! If you are using a deliberately "inefficient" fission primary for low fission yield, you can forget all the problems of efficient fission bomb design, and deliberately use "inefficient" systems.

What you are aiming for is low fission yield, not the use of a small amount of Pu239! It is vital to grasp this. To make a neutron bomb a more credible deterrent, we're not concerned with the amount of Pu239 in the primary stage, but with:

(1) the percentage of it which gets fissioned, and

(2) the coupling mechanisms used to deliver as much of that (small amount of) energy as possible to the fusion stage, to minimise wastage of tritium. This makes it cheaper!

 
At 4:59 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you Nige for your update about Mirzayanov's Novichok information book "State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program". I was amazed to see that on the American amazon.com site it has 5 star reviews, but on the UK site www.amazon.co.uk there is only one review by an associate of Corbyn's standpoint which gives only 1 star and claims:

"“Only the Russians” developed this class of nerve agents, said the chemist. “They kept it and are still keeping it in secrecy.” Yet the whole formula for Novichok is printed in the book not much of a secret then. After that I lost trust."

This is totally deluded because Mirzayanov was the one who leaked the formula, disclosing the Novichok program to the world. The fact that Putin keeps refusing to admit the truth over Po-210, Crimea, Ukraine, Syria and now Novichok doesn't stop dissidents from debunking him.

 
At 5:32 pm, Blogger nige said...

Thanks for pointing that propaganda out! I see a more positive review, helped by the analysis in this post, has now appeared from a friend of the truth www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1YXU3Z9VJRW1

 
At 7:08 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"This is completely wrong!"
If it's so wrong, then why has no nuclear test been conducted with say, 10 grams of fissile material, and a yield of 10-100 tons? Surely a core of less than one cubic centimeter in volume would make for a very compact weapon.
Or, maybe it would take an enormous implosion system weighing tons by itself, and a level of precision in the implosion sequence which has yet to be achieved in any modern nuclear weapon, in order to compress those 10 grams to the point of criticality. The amount of plutonium is not a big issue, at least not until you are talking about needing an atomic bomb for each of your enemy's tanks! Yes, that is exactly what was being considered in LA-9004. Sure, a weapon capable of producing a big yield can be adjusted to create a small yield, but it will still require the same amount of core material. That is easy. What is NOT easy is to MAKE a weapon using a tiny amount of fissile material. If they find a way to do it, using any of the approaches which have been suggested, that's great. If not, we can still have a deterrent using low kiloton yields, and other fighting equipment for deterring threats too small to waste an atomic bomb on.
Also, I didn't link to that article because I liked the author's opinion on normal nuclear deterrence. He was just presenting facts on a NEW APPROACH for creating ton yield nuclear weapons, using no fissile material at all and maybe under a gram of tritium. It looks like devices of this type are a long way off technologically.

 
At 8:17 pm, Blogger nige said...

You seem to be at cross purposes to whole point the neutron bomb. You think it's about making the most efficient use of tiny amounts of fissile material that is possible. It isn't. It's just about minimising the fission yield, and maximising the tritium-deuterium fusion yield!

I'm not interested in using small amounts of fissile material, like 10 grams of plutonium.

I'm not interested in designing an efficient fission implosion system - quite the opposite. It can be highly inefficient, because I only want my kilogram of fissile material to produce about 0.1% efficiency of fission.

What I am concerned about is maximising the efficient coupling of the energy to the fusion capsule. If the residual fissile material radioactivity is an issue, we could use highly enriched uranium-235, which has a much lower specific activity due to the fact that its half live is much longer than that of plutonium-239.

As a stop-gap, to halt an attack, we could simply use sub-kiloton W54 fission weapons, or bring the kiloton thermonuclear W79 neutron bomb back. This may have to happen, but the W79 is expensive in terms of tritium capsules, which have a half life of only 12 years. We make tritium by irradiating lithium inside nuclear reactors. If we could improve the coupling of energy in the W79 by supplementing the weak x-ray coupling mechanism (which is pathetic at kiloton yields, because the percentage of the energy given off as x-rays is tiny for fission weapons of small yield/mass ratio), we could improve the situation immensely.

One way to do this is use a magnetic field pulse from coils to help compress the ionized fusion capsule, by using power from a nuclear powered magnetic flux compression generator placed around the primary (fission) stage. In this scheme, as a shell of light-velocity radiation streams off the fissioning primary stage, it progressively ionizes the insulator of pre-charged induction coil placed around it, shorting it out. This pushes the existing electromagnetic field energy into an immense electromagnetic pulse, travelling out into the so-far not-yet-reached part of the induction coil, which can be fed into magnetic field generator coils placed around the fusion capsule. Thus, you can supplement x-ray ablation compression of the fusion capsule with magnetic field compression of it, once it has ionized (the expansion of an ionized capsule against magnetic field lines is resisted by a force which depends on the magnetic field strength).

If this system works, it could mean that the x-ray ionised fusion capsule's expansion may be delayed enough (by magnetic field compression) for neutrons from the fission primary stage to arrive. This could allow the replacement of tritium by lithium, because lithium could be fissioned by the neutrons in this configuration, of extended compression (normally this is not possible in neutron bombs, because of the timing mis-match; x-rays compress the fusion stage for a time span shorter than the time taken for neutrons to arrive and fission lithium to produce tritium). If only there was more interest in deterrence outside cash-strapped secret labs, we could probably make great progress.

 
At 9:11 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow. Corbyn really is a Lenin wannabe. This alone is a good reason for people to be educated about the millions of people who Lenin and Stalin executed, and the Communists' key role in expanding the Cold War arms race. It is also important to see how the USSR produced nerve gas agents while claiming to be disarming. This is reminiscent of the Nazis who armed Germany secretly in the years leading up to World War Two.

Another important takeaway from the information posted here: It appears that Novichok was developed in Russia, but its chemical structure was leaked to the rest of the world over two decades ago. At this point, many governments around the world have had time to study the structure, and find the most efficient methods of producing it (or rather producing the binary precursors to it). Currently, it is no longer a secret Russian weapon, but more a Russian contribution to the types of weapons which are available. If Novichok has enough advantages over other agents, it is likely that all of NATO have created stockpiles of its precursors, or at least have the capacity to produce such stockpiles. It is even possible that some ex-Soviet satellite countries are capable of manufacturing it. At this point, the type of agent used is not a good way of identifying this as a Russian poison attack. If somebody was shot by an AK-47 (a military rifle invented in the USSR) would we have to assume that a Russian did the shooting? Not really.

Realistically, though, we DO have strong evidence to assume that the Russians did the poisoning here. Nobody else would have an incentive to attack this particular man. For the Russians, however, it would be an opportunity to make an example of a defector, and showcase their abilities to poison people stealthfully, and en masse if they wish. It is also a brazen move showing that the Russian government is willing to attack people within the boarders of other countries, and is not afraid of the repercussions. Britain and the US need to show Russia that we are not afraid either. "Hard-line" negotiations and the expulsions of diplomats are great, but they need to be backed up by preparations such as civil defense. Without these, we remain at the mercy of their army, nuclear arsenal which supposedly is being reduced, and poison gas arsenal which was supposedly non-existent.

 
At 9:32 am, Blogger nige said...

"... . If Novichok has enough advantages over other agents, it is likely that all of NATO have created stockpiles of its precursors, or at least have the capacity to produce such stockpiles. ..."

Thanks for your comment, although I really don't see why it is "likely" that Porton Down has prepared stockpiles of Novichok, seeing that the UK Government has a history of using disarmament agreements as an excuse to cut research funding into weapons, even countermeasures, and that their budget was cut so much after the Cold War. The idea that all NATO countries have prepared Novichok stockpiles is, in view of history and the West's obsessive enforcement of chemical weapons convention laws (ignored by Putin with contempt), just totally deluded.

There was a period like this in the mid 1930s, when the Nazis propaganda official, Dr Goebbels, was trying to "ridicule" everyone (people like Winston Churchill) who were warning of secret German rearmament. They denounced the messengers as being warmongers, Jews, capitalists, anti-German racists, and so on, and they made up fake news about any slight defences in the West (like new fighter planes to defend against German bombers, and British gas masks to defend against gas attacks) being war preparations, instead of peaceful deterrence to try to avert war. Leaders like Chamberlain then went to meet Hitler and try to negotiate peace pledges for collaboration, to prevent a war. They proved to be delusions, but at the time these "peace makers" were given applause and positive media coverage, with newspapers hailing Chamberlain as as great peace maker. Because of the following WWII, that approach failed, and now we have to follow successful tactics, like those used by Reagan in helping to pave the way for a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. We need to negotiate from a position of strength, not rely on handshakes and doubletalk.

 
At 5:48 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nigel:

I think you should explain that not all British Labour Party members are racists who hate the Jews. Similarly, not all Nazi Party members hated the Jews. Some of them are just people who read newspapers like the Mirror and the Guardian, that censor the criticism of racists.

 
At 5:50 pm, Blogger nige said...

Thanks for pointing that out. However, this blog is about defensible facts relevant to national security and is not about speculations over why people do evil things.

 
At 11:23 am, Anonymous Alison Hubert said...

I find every word supporting the deterrence of WWIII offensive. I find all criticism of racists in Corbyn's Labour Party fan base offensive. I read the Guardian and watch BBC news. I find it offensive that that people are being allowed to criticise anything that is wrong.

Please take down this post. Facts are dangerous to know. People would be better off living in ignorance.

 
At 11:24 am, Blogger nige said...

Dear Alison:

If you find criticisms of your delusions offensive, then rest assured that I find your rudeness offensive too.

 
At 1:04 pm, Anonymous Ken Livingstone defender said...

Please apologise to Ken Livingstone. Hitler protected his Jewish former commanding officer, Ernest Hess. This is in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, not the fascist Jew hating Observer, Guardian or Mirror, so it proves that Hitler was not a racist and therefore Ken isn't either:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/9379575/Adolf-Hitler-protected-his-Jewish-former-commanding-officer.html

By Matthew Day7:08PM BST 05 Jul 2012
Hitler made the dramatic intervention to protect Ernst Hess, his old company commander from the Flanders trenches of the First World War, who had risen to be a judge in post-war Germany.

In a letter from August 27, 1941 to the Dusseldorf Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, one of the architects of the Final Solution, instructed the secret police to grant Hess "the relief and the protection as per the Fuhrer's wishes".

Himmler also instructed all authorities that Hitler's old comrade in arms was not "to be in-opportuned in any way whatsoever".

The letter was unearthed in a Gestapo file on Hess by Susanne Mauss, editor of the newspaper Jewish Voice from Germany.

 
At 1:10 pm, Blogger nige said...

If Hitler had protected all Jews, not just his former commander under whom Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class in WWI, then your point would be valid and I'd certainly never have criticised Ken.

But the facts are very different. Hitler had good reason to defend the man under whom he had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class in WWI. So what? That doesn't defend Ken's abusive slurs which appear to me and many others as a typical piece of Marxist incitement of hatred.

 
At 1:53 pm, Anonymous Uh Oh Jeremy Corbyn said...

Nigel,

If you google "effects of nuclear Weapons" this blog doesn't appear at all on the first page of results

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=effects+of+nuclear+weapons

Instead, it is CND stuff and a Daily Mail article about the lying NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the American Institute of Physicswhich uses unobstructed desert terrain data from Glasstone's nuclear weapons, ignoring Glasstone's warning that in modern concrete buildings in Hiroshima the median lethal range was reduced from 1.3 miles in the open to 0.12 miles inside modern city buildings. CND uses the same type of lies, as did the Marxists.

 
At 2:06 pm, Blogger nige said...

The problem with critising Dr Alex Wellerstein is that he deletes fair and honest criticisms from his blog comments while responding to complaints about his unprofessional censorship by making untrue slurs about critics. This means he is leaving only a deceptive selection of comments on his blog, which probably misinformed the Daily Mail.

I'm not responsible for Google's search engine design.

I did write a post long ago exposing the dishonesty of Dr Alex Wellerstein and received one comment from him in response (the only comment he ever made on this blog), a begging request to remove the post (mixed with a lack of comprehension of what I had written), which I did because I was delighted that he had at least bothered to make some sort of response to criticism, and because I'm not here to engage in personal arguments, but to inform people of the facts.

The reality is that the sort of people who make up lies about the effects of nuclear weapons are beyond rational discussion. They're paranoid, thin skinned, abusive bigots who manipulate and issue personal abuse against anyone with a valid criticism.

I am just sick of "discussions" over factual matters with plainly nasty bigots, and liars. If he wants to correct his blog or his Nukemap program rather than just being like a lawyer and adding a disclaimer about "uncertainties" in the notes, then I'll praise that.

There are millions of deluded liars out there and the idea that you can convey useful information to the public by exposing their deceptions is plain wrong. They just turn it from a discussion of facts into a lot of lies about personality, the old ad hominem "trick".

However, I think we should make an exception of CND's Vice-President Jeremy Corbyn, who is openly racist, who invites known racist terrorists to tea in the House of Commons.

Even then, we must keep criticisms to the facts. I've never made any personal comments, but those with a hate agenda claim otherwise because they are unable or unwilling to listen to genuine criticisms, the correction of which might help to make the world a little safer.

 
At 2:17 pm, Blogger nige said...

Update/correction: I have the blog post and his response saved, and the actual issue was about Feynman, not me. Feynman was of Jewish ancestry and Dr Alex Wellerstein made an inaccurate and in my humble unprofessional (inaccurate, poorly researched) hate attack on Feynman. I submitted a polite comment to Dr Alex Wellerstein's Restricted Data blog, merely quoting Feynman correctly to set the record straight. Dr Alex Wellerstein deleted my comment, leaving his misleading claims standing, so I lost the work I had done in typing the quotation in. The next year later, I found that I had highlighted the section in pencil in a book by Feynman, and I then published a post about it on this blog, here, pointing out that censorship of this kind can lead to a culture of authoritarian fascism as occurred in the 1930s. A few minutes later, I received a comment from Dr Alex Wellerstein, a strange mixture of abuse and apology, so I deleted the post to pacify him (the issue about Feynman was actually about his work on nuclear weapons, not the effects of nuclear weapons, but it was the principle of the censorship which I had objected to). I care about trying to make the world a better place, and not upsetting people if at all possible.

 
At 12:08 am, Anonymous Capitalist said...

Have you read Dinesh D'Souza, "The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left"? It exposes how communists obfuscate of the truth to the point of reversing everything. They are the racists, but they try to reflect back genuine criticisms on to the critics.

They interpret every fact using absurd conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalists. They assert false opinions about critics being racists. Marxist radicals, when questioned, just egotistically assert their contrived personal feelings are when put under pressure, e.g.

"When I hear people asking questions like that, what I comprehend is just how ignorant and racist those people are. I don't engage with that hatred,"

Said slowly, with long pauses between every other word (as Obama does), it wastes so much time that the TV producer has to move on to something else, and she gets away with it. Idiot viewers are just relieved when it moves on to something else less boring...

 
At 12:20 am, Blogger nige said...

No, I haven't read that book. Arrogance is something that seems to be loved by the media nowadays. It has always been a problem. IRA terrorism sympathiser McDonnell, Corbyn's shadow chancellor, has surprised me by making an effort to appear really nice and endearing on TV. Hitler and Stalin were both reported to have a charming personal manner, however. I don't trust much to style or presentation (I was judged on my defective speech and hearing as a child), but on FACTS.

The left use moral relativism and claim that facts aren't substantial because they are always open to interpretation, immediately before hypocritically banning any interpretation other than their own flawed one. Truth is the free analysis of all the facts using the best interpretation, which can only be found by trying a very diverse array of alternative interpretations. That's the method I work on. Marxists are just intolerant, bigots.

 
At 6:19 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's the racists in the BBC, Guardian and Mirror who are causing this tragedy by refusing to report the facts that debunk Corbyn's lies about being the world's leading anti-racist and the world's greatest peace maker. His involvement with the IRA contributed to violence by backing the terrorist's cause, not opposing terrorism. His involvement with the IRA, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the USSR also backed terrorist causes, and in every single example, when peace has come it has been due to our brave soldiers disarming or beating the terrorists with force, not by having tea with them in the House of Commons or by attending their racist rallies.

 
At 6:24 am, Blogger nige said...

Yep, the IRA peace agreement only resulted from brave British operations to disarm the terrorist IRA, the opposite of Corbyn's approach that failed, which was a repeat of Chamberlain's handshakes with Hitler applied to the IRA. In every case, Corbyn got it 100% wrong, but claimed he was the real deal. He is a nasty bigoted liar, like all members of CND. They're evil, they're issuing propaganda and fake news on weapons effects and civil defence like Richard Rhodes, and other American nukemap propaganda liars. They hate the truth and need to be exposed as evil, demented liars, who are nasty egotists, polluting popular culture with delusional manure for cash and acclaim from criminal minded thugs like terrorists.

Nigel B. Cook

 
At 6:41 am, Anonymous Psychologist said...

Nigel, I think you are taking the wrong approach here. You cannot expect to overturn a corrupt regime from the inside. Reform doesn't occur by discussions within a dictatorship. There is only one mode of progress against an evil dictator, revolution, whether due to many "traitors" within the system, or external force. The concept of a single opponent infiltrating an evil regime to overthrow it using rational arguments is absurd. They just see you as a traitor or whatever, and give you abuse or throw you out of their system.

You cannot reform a dictatorially evil civil defense opposing and nuclear weapons effects lying cult by nice rational arguments, by definition. You simply have to abandon efforts to inform them, accept they're criminals, and launch a revolution that will but them on the defensive. Then, remember the motto of the successful revolutionary: take no prisoners. If they pretend, like Alex, that they are being nice, they're only covering their own dirty lying backs.

 
At 10:01 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Always be abrasive to evil doers, being polite to them gives them the excuse to ignore you, to claim you are equivocal/confused or not truly committed to exposing and fighting evil lies that lead to massacres in Syria, Ukraine, etc.

 
At 10:08 am, Blogger nige said...

Yes, but you and whose army? Chamberlain had, as chancellor (i.e. while in the Cabinet, prior to taking over from Baldwin who was the previous Nazi appeasing Prime Minister), limited defence spending to such low levels in 1936-8 that by the time he met Hitler three times in 1938, Britain had LOST the arms race and was STILL CONTINUING to KNOWINGLY rearm SLOWER than Hitler, thus WIDENING the gap and NOT "buying time through appeasement to rearm Britain" as he lying claimed afterwards (a lie repeated by left wing racists to this day, proving again the Nazi-Commie collaboration as it was from August 1939 to June 1941).

In other words, if you are going to be assertive, you have to be able to "take no prisoners", in the words of "Psychologist" above. Basically, corrupt bigoted racists are all powerful, which is why they are where they are.

People who think that if only the Jews had stood up to Hitler sooner, everything would have been rosy, are deluded. Like Corbyn, Hitler smugly manipulated all news of opposition to suit his own evil agenda of racism, e.g. using opposition as an excuse for further terror.

 
At 11:16 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for the news cutting updates about the racism of the vice chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and current labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

What I find sickening most of all is that (ex-)Labour Peer Lord Alan Sugar is finally denouncing Corbyn using photoshopped tweets of Corbyn in a car beside Adolf Hitler.

That is so sick it's nauseating. If Lord Sugar feels Corbyn does not deserve support, he should use his power to do something useful to help humanity overcome this evil.

 
At 11:59 am, Anonymous Former Labour Party voter said...

Corbyn's tactic of saying he is the world's greatest peacemaker and the world's greatest most committed anti-racist, while actually doing the complete opposite, is Hitler's and Dr Goebbel's propaganda method.

Hitler claimed he was a great guy to pacify critics into appeasement policies which led to war, because he was lying.

Stalin similarly used what George Orwell called "doublethink", e.g. reversing the meanings of words for propaganda purposes.

Peace is war, racism is anti-racism, etc. If Corbyn thinks the Jews are racists regarding Palestine, then Corbyn's "anti-racism" is actually racism.

The man is a propaganda spin doctor and a proved liar regarding his dismissal of civil defence to save lives in war zones across the world, as you have repeatedly exposed for many years on this blog.

Keep it up.

 
At 12:06 pm, Blogger nige said...

Thank you, I'll try my very best.

It is heartening that some in the media are starting to investigate this subject, and are not being fooled by the lies of Richard Rhodes and other fairy tale accounts of the Cold War any more.

Let's pray there is still time.

 
At 12:23 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Corbyn invited hate preacher Raed Salah to tea at the House of Commons and Corbyn called him “a very honoured citizen”. Rael Salah had already been charged in Israel with inciting racist violence. That proves Corbyn is a racism.

Corbyn similarly met with Hamas whose charter is the terrorism and destruction of Jews. Likewise, Corbyn met with Hezbollah, another racist terrorist group.

He did nothing to oppose them, he encouraged them as he did the IRA, which he wanted to encourage to terrorise people in Northern Ireland.

Corbyn was provably paid £20,000 for similarly honouring Iran’s Press TV channel with an appearance, thus effectively backing a TV station that regularly hosts Holocaust deniers.

Corbyn defended the Rev Stephen Sizer who falsely circulated lies that the Jews of Israel caused 9/11.

Corbyn admitted being a troll who used Facebook for the harassment of Jews by his support of an absurdly antisemitic painting of Jews in a mural, but he claimed he didn't look closely at the racist painting before he defended it, an "excuse" that ignores the Legal precept that

"ignorantia neminem excusat" (ignorance is no excuse).

If he didn't have time to check the racist image he was endorsing, he shouldn't have done so.

Corbyn is a "man of principle" all right: he is a man of racist principle, a man of bigoted principle, a man of intolerant hatred principle, a man of evil principle. Supporters of his terrorism of Jews should be fined if there is not the prison space available for them.

 
At 1:00 pm, Blogger nige said...

4 April 2018: I just want to restate the key point in this blog post here in the comments section.

I agree 100% with Dr Alex Wellerstein (and Edward Teller) on the matter of government secrecy, which is a dictatorial threat to national security.

We need to abandon "diplomats" like Britain's bungling Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who makes ranting claims about Novichok WITHOUT PUBLISHING THE ACTUAL DATA HE HAS.

We need to publish all of the facts, just like Kennedy did with the "top secret" intelligence from U2 spy planes in the Cuban Missiles Crisis in October, 1962.

That is the only way to start any kind of dialogue with Russia to resolve this matter.

Keeping the facts secret was the stupid UK government policy on nuclear weapons effects and civil defence during the Cold War, which discredited both deterrence and live saving low cost countermeasures, because it allowed unopposed enemy communist propaganda (please see previous post on this blog for documentary evidence of this).

Similarly, secrecy on UK government Novichok nerve agent data is escalating a crisis.

Bloody well publish the evidence. Remember: Kennedy's decision led to the death of an American spy on 27 October 1962, U2 pilot Rudolf Anderson Jr. When a crisis is this bad, we have to risk some exposure of our intelligence gathering techniques, we cannot use official secrecy arguments to keep secret information which is so badly needed to settle this row for once and for all.

We must not publish a falsehood filled selective "dodgy dossier" like Tony Blair did to "justify" the 2002 Iraq War, but the full data we have. This country is supposed to be a free democracy, not a secretive manipulative dictatorial regime. We have spies to get information, and sometimes that data needs to be openly published, to defend freedom.

 
At 1:09 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Porton is now reportedly denying Russia made Novichok, if the BBC is to be trusted.

Apparently, they don't want to Putin to test out all 12 warheads of his new Satan 2 missile on Porton anytime soon.

Can't blame them.

;-)

 
At 2:00 pm, Anonymous Corbynite said...

You have mistyped Raed Salah's name as Rael Salah. Please show this respect for racist friends of Corbyn. Then he might just spare your life when he is Prime Minister of the UK.

 
At 3:19 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is Corbyn going to attend a 4 hour satire of Islamic Arabs, to balance what he did to Jews?

Racism is hypocrisy, a bias in which "offense" is taken if one race is mocked but not another.

Put it like this. Trump is often rude by personality, regardless of gender or color. He is rude to women, he is rude to women, he is rude to blacks, whites, and every race. He is therefore not a sexist or racist, because he does not discriminate. He's just a tough leader.

But Jeremy Corbyn does discriminate. He is lovely to racists and has never provoked Muslims, but he hates Jews. That's the factor which counts. Racial discrimination, a terrible bias.

 
At 3:40 pm, Anonymous phd said...

I think there is a lot of resentment about the need to help CND nuclear weapons effects lies predominate on the internet. But government policy is exaggerate the effects and ignore civil defense to cause fear, even if that means risking millions of lives. The politicians are not aware of lies. You should write a book exposing all of the deceptions in populist propaganda on the effects of nuclear weapons. A blog is too easy to ignore, like a person shouting out information for free on a roadside. 1.7 million views is not enough. Everyone needs to know the facts, and journalists want books, not blogs, as the basis for their articles on highly controversial subjects.

 
At 3:45 pm, Blogger nige said...

phd: I completed a book, "Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory" (which included test data to validate blast attenuation by damage done in a city, city skyline radiation screening including allowance for scattered radiation, etc.) in August 1990. No publisher wanted it, not because of technical details, but the whole subject of nuclear effects. They thought it was a subject only fit for official government publications, or that it would not sell enough to justify printing.

So, please, pay attention: the problem is that people like Carl Sagan and Richard Rhodes are effectively fiction writers, who have misled the public into fallacies, that can't be debunked because people aren't interested in the subject.

The situation was the same with gas and incendiary bomb firestorm fiction (lies) in the 1930s, which helped Corbyn (whoops I mean Hitler, sorry, typing error) start WWIII.

 
At 4:59 pm, Anonymous phd said...

So you think that most people tend to prefer nuclear war to be a topic for popular fiction, not popular fact?

:-)

 
At 9:36 am, Anonymous Sarcastic said...

Oh, I see. Russia jointly invaded Poland with Nazis in September 1939, then Russia massacred tens of thousands of the Polish nationals for being alleged Jewish capitalists in the Polish army, and Russia invaded Finland.

But that lasted barely 2 years. In June 1941 after Hitler failed to destroy the RAF and invade Britain in Hitler's "Operation Sea Lion", he invaded Russia instead.

So you see, it was Britain which caused Russia to fight the Nazis. If Britain had been led by someone with the mindset of Corbyn, and done a "peace deal" with racists to avoid frightful war, then it would have been invaded and the Nazi troops would not have been available to invade Russia.

Therefore, Russia might have continued as a collaborator of the Nazis, and Britain might now be part of a Nazi-Russian empire, with Corbyn celebrating the end of the allegedly imperialist, capitalist Jews.

 
At 9:43 am, Blogger nige said...

During the Cold War, leading anti-nuclear bigots who knew no facts about the real effects or capabilities of nuclear weapons for deterrence and the real data on survival in modern city buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also the civil defence shelters in Hiroshima and Nagasaka and at nuclear weapon tests in the 1950s, such as "historians" like A. J. P. Taylor (a founder of anti-nuclear CND) manipulated an lied about the "arms race" causing WWI and WWII in order, deliberately, to try to abuse history for nuclear disarmament. A. J. P. Taylor is worth singling out for the newspaper articles, books, TV appearances, publicity drives, and moreover, for his teaching the current generation of historians (including Sir Martin Gilbert, et al.) at Oxford University.

These ignorant bigots abused history for an agenda of hatred towards the only proven credible deterrence of world war. They continue to do so, so hardly entrenched is the dogma in the books by people like Richard Rhodes. We've been trying on this blog to stem a tide of hatred, but it is very hard because so many evil dupes believe crap from nazis.

 
At 9:47 am, Anonymous A.J.P. Taylor fake history and fake news loving shit said...

But surely WWI and WWII were caused by a nuclear arms race?

Surely the wars dragged on because Britain had so many arms at the beginning of the wars that it could not deter aggression?


Surely if Corbyn had been in charge, and had disarmed Britain of nuclear weapons in 1914 and 1939, war would have been avoided?

Disarm and no aggressor will think twice about invasion and massacre. So will then get peace. ("The peace of the dead", in the words of the title of Paul Mercer's great 1987 book.)

 
At 9:51 am, Blogger nige said...

Please don't publish sarcasm like that, which will just be used by liars to claim that this blog allows "confusing" comments to be published.

I will not be allowing any more of that kind of humour, because it always backfires.

We're dealing with hardened, desperate, ranting dictators who will try any excuse to cause harm, to abuse the facts, and to ignore the truth.

Thank you.

 
At 9:56 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Apologies

 
At 4:07 pm, Anonymous United Nations arms control expert said...

I've just seen this blog, and I am shocked by it. Your call to replace high yield countervalue warheads with 1 kiloton or subkiloton warheads on ICBMs to deter the aggressive invasions which actually start wars would end conventional wars and negate the basis of my job.

My job is based on trying to get rid of high yield warheads to end deterrence and return the world to the days of world wars, as in the examples you give of 1914 and 1939.

Your approach is to circumvent the entire mythology of the nuclear age by returning the the basic problem of deterring war in general, not just nuclear war.

I am also SHOCKED by your efforts to promote the facts about low cost civil defence to save lives in both conventional and nuclear wars, and also natural disasters where shelters are needed for survival.

You don't understand. The world has been fed the weapons effects myth of Richard Rhodes, A.J.P. Taylor, and other egotists for over a generation. They will never read or back your common sense call.

They will support the United Nations' efforts to keep killing innocent millions through propaganda.

This will keep me in my job, ensuring that suffering, violence, war, and terror continues.

Heil Hitler!

 
At 4:08 pm, Blogger nige said...

Not amusing, but I'll make an exception and publish that satire. No more, please.

 
At 5:04 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nigel:

We can all laugh at your idea to deter conventional war using credible nuclear deterrence, 1 kt or subkiloton warheads.

That was used to deter Russian invasions in the 1950s and 1960s, using a range of tactical kiloton yield warheads that would not cause any collateral damage to adjacent civilians.

For 600 m altitude 20 kt bursts like Hiroshima, the median survival range for people in the lower floors of modern concrete buildings is only 0.12 mile or so according to Glasstone, but soldiers on the move or in tanks would stopped due to being irradiated over a wider area because the protection in them is relatively poor. There is no local fallout of concern, as in Hiroshima which was not significantly contaminated.

After these warheads were removed in the 1970s due to Western Communist agitation by Brezhnev's liars called the "World Peace Council" (a USSR front, run by Moscow), Russia was able to invade Afghanistan in December 1979 with impunity. Then Reagan ordered the W79 neutron bomb, and a host of other weapons like Cruise Missiles sited in the UK, to deter further aggression.

Russia was morally defeated by this American build up, and warmonger Gorbachev was forced into concessions on human rights and properly inspected and verified arms control in 1987.

That's the real lesson of the Cold War. It was credible, tactical nuclear weapons that "did in" the USSR, not incredible countervalue strategic weapons. Deter invasions, and you get peace. Remove that deterrent, and you get war.

 
At 5:08 pm, Blogger nige said...

Yes. They deluded "arms control liars" pretend that tactical nuclear weapons "lower the nuclear threshold", whereas they actually increase it, because they deter the only proved route to nuclear warfare: conventional war!

It was conventional war in WWII that in August 1945 escalated into nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear strikes). Hence, deter conventional war with tactical nuclear weapons, and you won't get nuclear war.

This refutes the entire lying dogma of the Nazis who masquerade as "experts" on nuclear war.

 
At 5:17 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you Nigel.

What I most like about this blog is the lack of egotism, the fact that you put the facts and evidence first and don't try to hype your name or status with the blog.

This is so different to most of the ranting nonsense, which is just an attempt to get money by selling calendars with mushroom clouds or other gimmicks.

I also applaud the decision to call this blog after Glasstone, who was keen to deter war.

 
At 5:28 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Even though the concept of Democracy was beginning to catch on fire in Russia, nothing was fundamentally changing. I became involved with the Democratic Movement at my institute, and tried to persuade people to stop producing chemical agents, and I appealed to Moscow's Mayor Gravril Popov, but there were no results. Reluctantly at first, then more resolutely, I became a whistleblower. ... If I hadn't spoken up, who would have? Probably no one in the rest of the world would have known about Novichok.

"I appealed to the world community to pay attention to this problem in my first article published in the Moscow newspaper Kuranty in 1991, but there was no reaction. Then two more articles appeared in the September of 1992 issues of Moscow News and The Baltimore Sun, which resulted in my arrest for 'divulging state secrets'. This was the beginning of my persecution ... Despite my revelations and the ratification of the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention] by Russia, the Novichok program was not put under international control and ... the binary components [which when mixed together produce the nerve agent] are not on the list of controlled compounds of CWC. This is very troubling because there are no guarantees that Russia isn't continuing such secret programs. These are all extremely compelling reasons for amending the CWC to include these chemicals, but nothing has been done about it. I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed that these loopholes that were written into the CWC could very well have been built in intentionally."

- Dr Vil Mirayanov, "State Secrets", 2008, introduction.

He had to publish that book himself, and it was ignored and still is ignored by the fanatical racists of CND, and the Nazi controlled "United Nations" in New York which has done NOTHING about the Syrian Civil War because of Russia's veto. It's the 1930s drivel organ, the effectively WWIII supporting "League of Nations", all over again!!!!

Books only sell if they're either by someone already famous with a huge fan base, or on a subject that there is mass interest in: all CND propaganda for over 50 years has deliberately put people off nuclear deterrence by deliberate fear provoking terrorist hysteria propaganda, JUST like Nazi propaganda in the 1930s on weapons and civil defence.

Overturning that is impossible without media cooperation, and most of them provably don't give a damn about saving lives with either nuclear deterrence that works, or even civil defence that works. What they do care about is their bank accounts; making a quick buck. Thus Richard Rhodes's quoting lies about people running away from Hiroshima without any feet, and ignoring all Glasstone's data on the facts about survival in modern buildings in Hiroshima. Lies sell, facts don't.

Thank you very much for your efforts to make the facts available against the racists and terrorists of CND, and the fanatical liars who know nothing but how to perpetuate evil and terror to line their own pockets.

 
At 5:50 am, Blogger nige said...

Richard Rhodes put quotation marks around the report of someone running away with feet after Hiroshima, so that proves it either: (a) must be true, or (b) Rhodes isn't responsible it it is a lie.

I'd draw attention to Figure 1 in my extracts here (the data in which is the basis for Glasstone's data on survival in different situations in Hiroshima):

https://nige.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/dirkwood-report-summary6.pdf


"This data is vital for civil defense but is not being applied to the analysis of casualty rates from nuclear explosions for civil defense, since propaganda from America and Japan instead presents an “average” casualty curve, which covers up and obfuscates the differences in survival rates in different situations. In particular, the curves above disprove the “uniformly lethal firestorm” myth. Blast survivors were not all killed in the firestorm".


Rhodes ignores Glasstone's data and its implications. That's one problem. Another is that he cites and produces reprints of the destroyed areas in the SECRET (full) version of the US Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, but failed to point out that it makes it very clear that fire damage areas in Hiroshima are fake for modern cities:

"Figure 2: The U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey classified its detailed reports 92 and 93 on the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “Secret”, and instead published an obfuscating summary report which omits the evidence that the firestorm in Hiroshima was due to the overturning of charcoal cooking braziers in bamboo and paper screen filled wooden houses, not thermal radiation. This caused anti-civil defense propaganda to falsely associate the firestorm radius to the thermal radiation exposure at that radius, instead of correctly associating it to the blast effect in overturning obsolete charcoal braziers. Report 92 on Hiroshima actually states (pages 4-6, May 1947): “Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero [i.e., (975^2
- 600^2)^{1/2} = 770 m ground range] stated that black cotton black-out curtains were
ignited by flash heat... A large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was, however, in agreement that a great majority of the original fires were started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires....”

The unclassified 1957 U. S. Department of Defense book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons obfuscated this evidence, vaguely stating on pages 322-3: “Definite evidence was obtained from Japanese observers that the thermal radiation caused thin, dark cotton cloth, such as the black-out curtains that were in common use during the war, thin paper, and dry, rotted wood to catch fire at distances up to 3,500 feet (0.66 mile) from ground zero (about 35 calories per square centimetre).” Thus, black coloured curtails [wartime blackout curtains to stop bombers seeing lights from homes in cities for use as bomb targets], thin paper and dry, rotted wood, needed 35 cal/cm2 to ignite in the coastal cities of Japan during August when there was high humidity. White curtains, which are more common now that air raid precautions no longer demand black window curtains, require much higher thermal exposures for ignition than black curtains."

- https://nige.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/dirkwood-report-summary6.pdf

I've also put the photocopy PDF's of the relevant extracts from the secret Hiroshima report on internet archive here to prove all this, years ago (it's still ignored by CND liars):

https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima

Cheers.

 
At 6:28 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hadn't seen that report. You should link to it in your debunking of Russian / CND lies about neutron bomb at https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/samuel-glasstone-and-philip-j-dolan.html

 
At 6:40 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://theconversation.com/the-understandable-fear-of-nuclear-weapons-doesnt-match-reality-73563

The understandable fear of nuclear weapons doesn’t match reality
March 14, 2017 10.48am GMT •Updated March 14, 2017 1.23pm GMT

Mattias Eken
PhD Candidate in Modern History, University of St Andrews

"... In his 2013 book Command and Control, the author Eric Schlosser tried to scare us into perpetual fear of nuclear weapons by recounting stories of near misses and accidents involving nuclear weapons. One such event, the 1980 Damascus incident, saw a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile explode at its remote Arkansas launch facility after a maintenance crew accidentally ruptured its fuel tank. Although the warhead involved in the incident didn’t detonate, Schlosser claims that “if it had, much of Arkansas would be gone”.

"But that’s not quite the case. The nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead on the Titan II missile had a blast radius of 10km, or an area of about 315km². The state of Arkansas spreads over 133,733km², meaning the weapon would have caused destruction across 0.2% of the state. That would naturally have been a terrible outcome, but certainly not the catastrophe that Schlosser evokes.

"Overdoing it

"Claims exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons have become commonplace, especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In the early War on Terror years, Richard Lugar, a former US senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that terrorists armed with nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the Western way of life. What he failed to explain is how.

"It is by no means certain that a single nuclear detonation (or even several) would do away with our current way of life. Indeed, we’re still here despite having nuked our own planet more than 2,000 times – a tally expressed beautifully in this video by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto)."

My problems with the 2013 book Command and Control, by the author Eric Schlosser, is quite different to Eken's: the X-unit capacitor banks need charging up from the batteries in a nuclear weapon tens of seconds prior to detonation to provide the short duration huge current required for accurate, simultaneous detonation. You can fire electrical detonators with much lower currents without prior charging, but then they take longer to fire and go off randomly in time over a long period of milliseconds or more, hence you get no nuclear yield (a 1-point detonation of the implosion system). Then nuclear weapons need precise pulses at precise times (aside from the charging of x-unit capacitors in advance): the neutron generator has to fire its pulse at at a given number of nanoseconds after the electrical firing system has started the implosion. This is because the compressed core doesn't remain compressed, but immediately starts to rebound outwards after the shock reaches the middle and reflects back outwards. Eric Schlosser doesn't know the basics and his book contains misleading, emotional quotes from declassified documents that don't contain the key facts. It's so easy to tell the truth, but it won't sell. You have to lie to sell books on this subject. That's why liars like Rhodes and Schlosser get away with it. Their fans then believe the lies. It's a bit like superstitions in religion: loads of people like to believe it is moral to believe in things which don't have solid evidence.

 
At 6:51 am, Blogger nige said...

Thanks, but that article ends with:

"Of course, if the effects of nuclear weapons have been greatly exaggerated, there is a very good reason: since these weapons are indeed extremely dangerous, any posturing and exaggerating which intensifies our fear of them makes us less likely to use them. But it’s important, however, to understand why people have come to fear these weapons the way we do.

"After all, nuclear weapons are here to stay; they can’t be “un-invented”. If we want to live with them and mitigate the very real risks they pose, we must be honest about what those risks really are. Overegging them to frighten ourselves more than we need to keeps nobody safe."

- http://theconversation.com/the-understandable-fear-of-nuclear-weapons-doesnt-match-reality-73563

I don't believe that the author of this article comprehends the immense efforts using immense financial resources which have been made by "professional" abusive, nasty liars in the Marxist movement and the Kremlin, not to mention fellow travellers in bullshit academia, a front for pseudo-science. The British and French racist pseudo-scientific eugenicists from Darwin's relative Sir Francis Galton to French Medical Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell who laid the foundations for the Holocaust got away scot free with mass murder, none were hanged after WWII. Similarly, the nuclear weapons effects exaggeration and civil defence "ridicule" liars have managed to murder maybe 100,000,000 people if you add up the deaths they have caused since then. The ploy of CND to exaggerate nuclear effects came originally from secretive government bureaucrats who couldn't or wouldn't publish all the evidence the public needed on nuclear effects and civil defence effectiveness against countermeasures, when it was needed (when the story was fresh in the news):

https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/racist-mass-murdering-fascists-of.html

Bob Darke, Hackney Council Communist Party Councillor, "The Communist Technique in Britain", Penguin Books Special S160, 1952, pages 146-7:

"The Communist Peace Campaign was under way ... Out of the great confusion, the fear and the bewilderment of the post-war world, the Party picked the blackest and most terrifying spectacle of all - the Atomic Bomb. At all peace activities, all meetings, all demonstrations, we were instructed to display large posters declaring 'Ban the Atom Bomb!' ... The pamphlet's subject-material consisted of ... the effects of atomic warfare: the blinding, the maiming, and killing. [Not mentioning the deterrence of world war and the deterrence of effective, concentrated invasion forces that set off wars such as the invasion of Belgium 1914, Poland 1939, Afghanistan 1979, or Kuwait 1990.] ... The non-Party press helped us unwittingly by publishing large maps showing the extent of damage which would occur if an atom bomb fell in the centre of London. There was great jubilation in the Party when we discussed the propaganda value of these maps to our Peace Campaign. ... the Peace Campaign sprang less from a people's spontaneous and natural desire than from the direct decision of the Soviet-controlled Coninform. Every Communist fellow-traveller ... clergymen, artists, actors - all were now canvassed. ... We were instructed to infiltrate innocent peace movements and swing them into line behind us [for evidence of this communist fascism running CND, see link at https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/racist-mass-murdering-fascists-of.html to https://archive.org/stream/UKCivilDefenceCorpsScientificBasis/UK%20Civil%20Defence%20Corps%20scientific%20basis#page/n287/mode/2up and similar stuff on Internet Archive, which disproves CND rants, which are just Kremlin shit]."

 
At 6:55 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What I find it so scary that during the previous Cold War, Russian spies headed by Boris Ponomarev (who was on the Politburo see https://archive.org/stream/UKCivilDefenceCorpsScientificBasis/UK%20Civil%20Defence%20Corps%20scientific%20basis#page/n289/mode/2up ) sent propaganda lies direct to UK schools to instruct Marxist NUTs (National Union of Teachers militants) to indoctrinate kids on propaganda, and this ended up biasing nuclear weapons understanding in Western society. What evil scum.

 
At 6:58 am, Blogger nige said...

There were newspaper disclosures of what was going on, please see:

https://archive.org/stream/UKCivilDefenceCorpsScientificBasis/UK%20Civil%20Defence%20Corps%20scientific%20basis#page/n291/mode/2up



But left wing media ignored such evidence (they still do today) and circulated unsubstantiated and lying propaganda.

 
At 7:04 am, Anonymous Gerard Hall said...

Wow. Thanks for those very useful references for my college thesis.

 
At 9:46 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Nige. Can I ask you why you are running this blog? It's the human interest story that sells news, not the statistics or other data.

I see you have provided some new American government research on how urban city skylines attenuate blast, thermal radiation and nuclear radiation here: https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/secret-british-wwii-data-dr-d-g.html

Why don't they run their models for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and publish the results to debunk anti-nuclear "Nukemap" lying propaganda?

Are they part of the plot to insult everybody's intelligence?

The Lord Penney, DEJ Samuels and GC Scorgie paper proving the cumulative blast reduction by the city skyline in Hiroshima, "The nuclear explosive yields at Hiroshima and Nagasaki", Phil. Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v266, pp357-424 states clearly on page 417 that fall in apparent nuclear yield deduced from reliable (e.g. bent steel pole of lab measured characteristics; Penney of course spent £450 in excess baggage in 1945 taking all the key evidence from Japan back to London for full lab analysis) blast gauges proved blast pressure reduction with distance, invalidating Glasstone and Dolan's curves for bare desert:

"... the mechanical damage done by the blast and the scattering of the blast by buildings [i.e. diffraction, which reduces pressure, contrary to some statements by Glasstone and Dolan, which is why sound doesn't travel as far in a dense city as over bare ground and visibility is reduced by skyline obstruction due to buildings] in the two cities must to some extent have reduced the blast waves as the waves spread."

The next page quantifies this effect of blast reduction in Table 8 for Hiroshima, where for example at 5700 feet from ground zero in Hiroshima the 4 gallon petrol cans proved that the:

"peak overpressure was down by about half ... clear evidence that the blast was less than it would have been from an explosion over an open site."

On page 419, Table 9 for Nagasaki shows the same blast reduction due to damage done, where the 4 gallon petrol cans at 6400 feet from ground zero in Nagasaki proved that the:

"peak overpressure down by about half ... clear evidence of the reduction of blast by the damage caused and by scattering."

The same Table 9 for Nagasaki also deduces from 4 gallon petrol cans at 7600 ft from GZ:

"overpressure not much over 1 psi ... clear evidence of reduction of blast."

 
At 10:02 am, Blogger nige said...

https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/deja-vu-review-of-dr-bridgmans.html

The amount of energy needed to knock any house down is pretty easy to find out from the work equation.

Typical data for such calculations is in a 2001 DTRA book by Bridgman, "Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects":

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

xt = [A/(fM)]{integral symbol}[sin(ft)](Pt + CDqt)dt metres,

where A is the cross-sectional face-on area of the building facing to the blast (e.g., 163 square metres), f is the natural frequency of oscillation of the building (e.g., 5 Hz), M is the mass of the building, Pt is the overpressure at time t, CD is the drag coefficient of the building to wind pressure (CD = 1.2 for a rectangular building), and qt is the dynamic pressure at time t. (There is a related calculation of the peak deflection of a structure on pages 250-284 of the 1957 edition of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons.) Bridgman points out that this equation ignores:

(1) the fact that the net force from the overpressure suddenly ends once the shock front has engulfed the building and is pressing on the rear side with a similar pressure to that that on the front side, and

(2) the end of the building oscillations due to energy loss from causing damage or destruction of the walls and other components of the building.

The effect of these limitations can easily be incorporated into the model by (1) calculating the time taken for the shock front to transverse the length of the building, and (2) using nuclear test data to indicate the peak pressure associated with a given degree of damage or destruction (this allows the amount of deflection of walls to be correlated to the probability that the wall fails).

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

E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ.

For a table and a graph plot of Penney's data on the effect of such energy absorption in Hiroshima, see https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/samuel-glasstone-and-philip-j-dolan.html (section entitled "CUMULATIVE BLAST WAVE PRESSURE REDUCTION BY DAMAGE CAUSED"):

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8adFNycaanI/Sgr2AKtEmaI/AAAAAAAAAzA/JhHuT3sIaNg/s1600-h/table1.JPG

and

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8adFNycaanI/S025Wc2ZM-I/AAAAAAAABVg/EUa9xkvpWVQ/s1600-h/attenuation.JPG

which gives an empirical equation showing that the peak overpressure in Hiroshima was reduced by the factor exp(-R/3.25) where R is distance from ground zero in kilometres.

This shielding of the blast wave effect gets progressively more important for higher yields and for cities with denser, taller, stronger buildings which can absorb more energy in being pushed into vibrations.

It is insignificant, of course, for the kind of lightweight desktop model buildings that some people used, to try to debunk the fact that oscillating a skyscraper takes up energy!

 
At 12:43 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"empirical equation showing that the peak overpressure in Hiroshima was reduced by the factor exp(-R/3.25) where R is distance from ground zero in kilometres."

That would be very important for damage from a megaton bomb on a large city, because the distances are larger than in Hiroshima. Presumably the the factor of 1/3.25 in the equation would scale in direct proportion to the average mass of the city building (a lot more in a modern steel and concrete skyscraper city, than in the wood frame houses that covered most of Hiroshima) and also in proportion to the area of the ground covered with buildings. (Which is well known for August 1945 Hiroshima, since the US Strategic Bombing Survey published a colour map in its Secret report https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima ).

hat I want to know is, does this exponential factor also depend on weapon yield or is independent of yield like the shielding of neutrons or thermal radiation effects?

 
At 1:02 pm, Blogger nige said...

I keep hearing stone-walling type objections about yield effects in blast attenuation by damage done as the blast spreads out over a city.

The first thing to remember is to look at the damage actually done by a given pressure level in say 20 kt and 10 Mt. There is test data from Nevada, Maralinga and from Pacific high yield shots at Mike, Castle, and Redwing shots for this on different structures, test shelters, etc.

We know how the pressure needed to inflict a certain amount of damage depends on blast duration. If the peak pressure is below that needed for damage, however, no damage occurs regardless of how long the blast wave lasts.

So there is a low pressure threshold that is fixed, and impulse is not a valid criteria for damage at high yields for peak pressures below that needed for damage. It is totally false.

Contrary to universal use of W^{0.4} scaling for drag sensitive targets in the over simplified damage-distance nonographs in the 1962-77 editions of Glasstone and Dolan, the correct damage-distance scaling law is the W^{1/3} for very high yields because the blast duration effect becomes less and less important at high yields, where the blast duration is so long that only the peak pressure is important for determining damage.

Contrary to the impression given in "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons", the real data (tabulated in an Appendix of DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, 1972) shows that pressures for damage become independent of yield for very high yields. Only at low yields is there a significant dependency. Thus, thresholds for damage are determined by blast impulse criteria for low yields, but by peak pressure criteria for very high yields (the opposite of the oversimplified claim made by Glasstone).

However, at high pressures where buildings fail, the debris will be accelerated by blast winds during the time those winds last, and this absorbs energy. So moving objects that absorb blast energy like the flying debris will pick up more energy from the blast at high yields, because the blast duration scales as W^{1/3}. Detailed calculations are needed to study this.

 
At 2:32 pm, Anonymous Law and order said...

On 6 April 2018, Salisbury District Hospital reported that both Sergei Skripal and his daughter are recovering and might therefore be able to provide testimony in court if the police and crown prosecution service decide to take legal action over the assassination attempt, although if Putin is personally charged he may refuse to attend a charge of attempted murder. So justice may yet be done, at least on paper. A public inquiry might be preferable, as was the case over Putin's London assassination of Litvinenko in 2006 using Russian Po-210.

 
At 6:11 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The objection about yield effects and attenuation is separate from the one about the change in overpressure needed to cause damage. For attenuation, it is based on the assumption that buildings absorb a certain amount of energy for a given overpressure, regardless of duration. If a building with a surface area of 163 square meters facing the blast absorbs 2.6 MJ at 10 psi regardless of duration, then that energy loss will have a greater effect at low yield then high yield. A 10 psi blast wave from a megaton yield will have longer duration, and more energy available per unit of area, then a kiloton yield. It would seem that the attenuation would be less for the lower yield, based only on the energy used to deflect the building.

However, if you include the energy used to accelerate debris produced at higher pressures, then any building that gets seriously will absorb more energy from the longer duration blast wave, and thus attenuate it just as much as the short duration one.

Perhaps more importantly, a building (or tree, or hill) will reduce blast effects not only by deforming mechanically, but also by generating air friction, and directing the blast upward. Even if you had an object which hardly moved or deformed at all on exposure to the blast, it would still cause a drastic reduction in overpressure and especially dynamic pressure. This effect can be seen in day-to-day life, with wind. When a wind picks up, it deforms trees (and to a lesser extent buildings), giving up some of its kinetic energy, and giving the trees potential energy. As the wind continues, the trees stop bending (this is assuming a wind too weak to actually break or topple them) and they stop absorbing energy. The wind can blow all day, without them bending any more then they did initially.

However, if you walk between the trees or buildings, you will still feel less wind than if you were on an open plain in the same weather. The objects are not absorbing energy themselves, but rather deflecting it a dissipating it. The same thing happens with a blast wind. It is possible to exert a hydrostatic pressure on a rigid stationary object (e.g. inside a sealed tank of compressed air) without expending energy, but you cannot exert a dynamic pressure on an object without dissipating energy in the form of waste heat and turbulence. Even if a building were perfectly rigid and immovable (a physical impossibility), it would still lead to a loss of energy which is not seen over an open desert or ocean.

 
At 6:49 pm, Blogger nige said...

Thanks, that's a good point.

"If a building with a surface area of 163 square meters facing the blast absorbs 2.6 MJ at 10 psi regardless of duration, then that energy loss will have a greater effect at low yield then high yield."

But the amount of energy absorbed for 10psi peak overpressure is not fixed at 2.6MJ irrespective of blast duration. The equation I used from page 304 of the 2001 edition of Dr Bridgman's excellent "Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects" (DTRA) to calculate the peak displacement of the centre of mass of a building by blast does include the blast duration, because Bridgman uses the force (pressure times area) integrated over the duration of the blast wave. The energy absorbed, E = xF, is proportional to this maximum displacement, x, in the direction of the force.

Therefore, at higher weapon yields with longer duration blast, the building will suffer larger oscillations, thereby soaking up more blast energy.

Hence, as a first approximation, you'd expect the percentage of energy absorbed from each square metre of the surface of the incident shock front by a building to be unaffected by yield, so that pushing up the yield (and blast duration) at a fixed overpressure will simply mean that buildings sway more violently, absorbing more energy in absolute terms, but a similar percentage of the blast.

If so, then the simple exponential attenuation of blast over a city which Bill Penney deduced at Hiroshima, exp(-R/3.25 kilometres) can be easily extrapolated to modern cities. Just scale the exponent factor 1/3.25 in proportion to the average mass and the average height of the buildings in the city, and also in proportion to the average building density (for Hiroshima this was determined from aerial photographs of the target taken before detonation to be 5,400 buildings per square kilometre). Hence, it is easy to estimate.

 
At 6:56 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The objection about using cube root scaling is different. In most cases, if it takes say 10 psi to break a wall at 20 kt, it will still not break from anything less at higher yields. Whether it is 20 kt, or 20 Mt, the blast loading must exceed a certain value to overcome the mechanical strength of the wall. This is true to some degree even for targets commonly called "impulse sensitive." If these targets did not have some minimum value of loading to cause damage, they would fall down from gravity, or gentle but sustained winds. That doesn't happen.

Duration matters more at yields below a certain threshold, which depends on the target structure. A weak wall which needs a minimum of 10 psi to break for kiloton yields may stand up to well over 20 psi from a ton or (especially) kilogram yield, without any cracking or permanent deflection. Even when a blast wave more than strong enough to destroy an object strikes it (e.g. 20 psi striking a window face-on), it does not instantly break apart. First, the target experiences elastic deformation. The deformation does not happen instantly, because material with inertia has to be moved. If the blast wave is strong enough, AND lasts long enough, it will eventually distort the target to the point that it suffers some kind of damage, like fracturing or plastic deformation. This is as true of a human chest cavity as it is of a window, or a wall, or a tree. You can prove that window glass has elasticity (and thus a finite response time to blast) by looking at a reflection in a window and pushing on it. Even a slight force in the middle of the glass pane will change it into a slightly concave reflector, and distort the reflection. For most "duration insensitive" targets, this effect only comes into play at subkiloton or ton yields. Thus, a house which collapses at 11 psi for 1, 100, or 10000 kt might not collapse until 30 psi from 1 ton of HE.

At even lower yields, another effect comes into play. A house (or whatever target) that collapses at 30 psi from 1 ton will probably collapse due to walls separating at the foundation, or dishing in and breaking up due to excessive flexing. These are all effects which involve the force on the wall as a whole. With a smaller yield (eg. a 3.7 kg cannon shell) the parts of the wall further away from the shell will be exposed to much less overpressure. Now, the force (in the part closest to the shell) has to be enough not only to make the wall fail where loads are concentrated, but to crush the actual material on a small scale. It will take a much greater pressure (force per unit area) to punch a localized hole in a wall then to knock the entire thing over with diffused force. Again, this can be proven easily. A a few kg of force per square centimeter of your fingertip will do no harm to the outside of a door, or a wood frame or cinderblock building. But the same force density, applied to an entire wall by, would cause some real damage.

None of this really matters when comparing data from Hiroshima with a strategic warhead, or even with collateral damage from an enhanced radiation warhead. Hpwever, it all makes a tremendous difference when comparing these kiloton bursts with normal HE bursts measured in kilograms!

 
At 7:20 pm, Blogger nige said...

Thanks. Just to clarify, I do believe that a simple exponential attenuation law such as Penney found when he visited Hiroshima in October 1945 and measured the effects on 4 gallon petrol tins, blast distorted steel poles, etc., is valid for useful quick calculations of average blast pressures in cities with different types and densities of building.

The best way to explain the yield effect is by analogy to radiation shielding. If you have an exponential or other shielding law (e.g. one with a build up factor for scattered rays), the is not significantly affected by the intensity or the duration of the radiation.

Practically the same percentage of energy is absorbed, regardless of how long the radiation lasts, an regardless of the intensity. (There is strictly speaking, a very small effect due to radiation modifying the shield, e.g. if the radiation is neutrons, then the cumulative absorption of neutrons by the shield material will increase the mass of the shield slightly, giving better shielding! But this is trivial for practical purposes.)

What happens when the duration of the radiation pulse is increased (or intensity is increased) is that the shielding material absorbs more energy, but the fraction or percentage of radiation absorbed by a shield is (for practical purposes) independent of the duration or intensity.

What I'm saying is that there is a simple physical analogy between the oscillation of electrons or nuclei by the energy absorbed from a radiation beam, an the oscillation of buildings by energy absorbed from a blast wave. (Hence Penney's data from Hiroshima which gives a simple exponential formula for energy attenuation with distance in a city.)

 
At 7:40 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree. At higher yields, buildings absorb more energy (and more importantly dissipate and deflect it without absorbing it) so the degree of attenuation per kilometer should stay the same. Of course, since a higher yield weapon (in an open area like NTS/PPG tests) will supposedly produce a given overpressure at a longer distance, any given overpressure will be reduced more for a higher yield, because the shock front will have traveled further and been attenuated by more buildings. It's a bit like the difference between initial (or thermal) radiation of a 1 kt burst at 300m vs a 100kt burst at 3km, or a 10Mt burst at 30 km. The increased thickness allows the air to attenuate it more!

The issue with inertially and elastically delayed response to blast loading, and the increased resistance of structures to highly localized loads, is important for other reasons. Cube root scaling says that a 100 kg yield should have 10% of the blast radius on any given target as a 100 tonne yield, and as such should do 1% as much damage. However, for the reasons outlined in a previous comment, the peak overpressure required to damage most buildings will be higher for the 100 kg yield. As such, it will do less than 1% as much damage.

To clarify, this effect is not very important for say, a house or human body, if the yield is over a few kt. On the other hand, it is vital to understand these effects if you are to compare damage and casualties from nuclear warfare with damage from enormous numbers of small blasts, like the numerous conventional bombings of world war 2, the Vietnam war, etc.

 
At 9:11 pm, Blogger nige said...

Regarding humans, research by UK in WWII using 1 kg TNT conventional weapons on animals and scaling to 70 kg human body mass gave over 200 psi as the lethal peak overpressure for lung rupture, due to air locks stopping blood flow in arteries (bubbles of air being forced into the blood stream). American nuclear tests with animals in trenches at Nevada showed that for kiloton TNT yields, only about 60 psi was needed for the same effect (at higher yields it remains about 60 psi). So there is an blast duration effect on primary blast injury, too.

What was interesting is that, once you screen out the radiation and flying debris/dust (easily done with a few feet of dirt, which in a crisis means that bulldozers and backhoe diggers can very quickly make useful shelters), people can survive close to the crater lip. The UK nuclear tests in the 1950s developed an entrance design to add to the WWII Anderson shelter that would shield scattered nuclear radiation from getting in through the entrance.

It was only finally published in the 1982 UK government book "Domestic nuclear shelters - technical guidance", but as usual they didn't include any of the impressive secret UK nuclear test reports on proof-testing shelters, so it didn't kill off civil defence haters.

 
At 8:13 am, Anonymous History fan said...

I find it curious that the history of the August 1939 - June 1941 Nazi-Russian collaboration, which included as you say the Katryn Forest Massacre by the Russia, the savage invasion of Finland by Russia, and the Russian invasion of Poland in September 1939 in collaboration with the Nazis, is omitted or suppressed in Western history books, NOT just Stalin's textbooks!

Churchill is partly responsible for his balmy drunken pro-Stalin propaganda speeches, his suppression of criticisms of Russia for its 1939-41 atrocities and Nazi collaboration, and its largely successful efforts to dupe Roosevelt into believing that love would win over Stalin!

If you look up the August 1939 - June 1941 Russian-Nazi extermination of Jews in British college history textbooks written by authors who are clearly biased towards Marxism (e.g. when you look at what they write of the Cold War and nuclear deterrence), you find references to the efforts of Stalin to make a pact with the UK before WWII.

The UK didn't like the news of Stalin's 1930s purges and declined to make a pact with the devil, so then Stalin turned to Hitler and made a pact with Hitler: just as Britain's Chamberlain had done when visiting Hitler in September 1939, the "famous piece of paper" bearing the signatures of Hitler and Chamberlain, and promising jaw, jaw, not war, war.

However, this is fake news, or fake history, of the Orwellian liars sort, because there was a secret WAR collaboration annex in the Nazi-Russian August 1939 "peace" pact. Now, as people who disagree with Marxism bias in history try to argue, this was the spark for WWII. It was Stalin's secret decision to agree to jointly invade Poland during September of 1939 which FORCED HITLER to ignore Chamberlain's ultimatum to him to stop his invasion.

Hitler was secretly committed under the terms of the secret annex to the August 1939 pact with Stalin to invade Poland. Thus, Russia sparked off WWII. If Russia hadn't reached a joint commitment in August 1939 to jointly invade Poland with the Nazis, the British ultimatum to Germany about its invasion of Poland might have been replied to, saving lives.

 
At 8:29 am, Blogger nige said...

If anyone wants to make controversial historical or technical comments, they are welcome to do so here, but please give a name, and some bona fide url.

I'm getting too many anonymous comments with content that takes up my time to verify, and I am busy like everybody else.

Thanks.

 
At 12:45 pm, Anonymous Jeremy said...

Nigel,

I´d advise you to delete this blog before Jeremy Corbyn is elected Prime Minister and implements his new "doublethink" policy: "tolerance means taking offense at the truth".

Or: "bigotry is tolerance".

Or: "moral relativism means that 2+2 = 5 is just as valid as 2+2 = 4".

Or: "class war is peace".

Or: "religious war is peace".

Or: "gender war is peace".

Or: "one sided nuclear & novichok chemical war (by Russia) is peace because it kills off the cause of progress, capitalism".

Or: "race war rioting is peace because it divides the country under the Tories, thereby allowing Marxists into power due to their peace propaganda spin machine".

Or: "hell is heaven, because by destroying capitalism using appeasement of Stalinist dictators, they use secret pólice to get rid of individualism, free criticisms of bigoted authorities, innovators, real debate, and real progress."

 
At 12:46 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nigel,

I´d advise you to delete this blog before Jeremy Corbyn is elected Prime Minister and implements his new "doublethink" policy: "tolerance means taking offense at the truth".

Or: "bigotry is tolerance".

Or: "moral relativism means that 2+2 = 5 is just as valid as 2+2 = 4".

Or: "class war is peace".

Or: "religious war is peace".

Or: "gender war is peace".

Or: "one sided nuclear & novichok chemical war (by Russia) is peace because it kills off the cause of progress, capitalism".

Or: "race war rioting is peace because it divides the country under the Tories, thereby allowing Marxists into power due to their peace propaganda spin machine".

Or: "hell is heaven, because by destroying capitalism using appeasement of Stalinist dictators, they use secret pólice to get rid of individualism, free criticisms of bigoted authorities, innovators, real debate, and real progress."

 
At 2:28 pm, Anonymous BenH said...

Nige, I recall that you often compare the numerous small conventional explosives used in WW2 to an equivalent megatonnage using an exponent of 2/3 for area damage. Mathematically it makes sense and always seemed true to me, however; the conversation you had above on smaller yields requiring higher peak over-pressures than at high yield seems to that discredit that scaling. Can you still compare conventional bombs to large yield nuclear bombs in that manner (using the yield to the power of 2/3)? What is the correct way of scaling numerous, say, 500 kg bombs to kiloton plus nuclear bombs? Thanks!

 
At 4:08 pm, Blogger nige said...

Please see the empirical data plotted on a graph in the post https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/russian-anti-terrorism-policing-world.html which also gives a detailed comparison for examples of conventional to nuclear wars. E.g. the 170 million conventional shells fired at German trenches by the British Army in WWI were equivalent in damage to 408 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons, while the damage from ~8 Mt of conventional bombs dropped on Vietnam in the 1960s was equivalent to 766 one megaton bombs.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-346jad4JH-w/Ui2Gpbk98LI/AAAAAAAADnM/kcZo1Igsk40/s1600/mortality+vs+explosive+energy+yield.JPG

Although longer blast duration blows debris further, at higher yields over a city you get more blast energy absorption by more buildings on a given radial line, for a fixed overpressure. Therefore, the two yield modifying effects work in opposite directions. In addition, the longer blast arrival times for a given overpressure at higher yields means more time for duck and cover to reduce casualties (e.g. 1 psi peak overpressure may arrive at 0.4 second after burst for 1 ton of TNT, 4 seconds for 1 kiloton, and 40 seconds for 1 megaton).

Given simple civil defense shelters like indoor table shelters or outdoor earth-covered trenches, the thermal and blast effects tend to become less effective at causing casualties than initial nuclear radiation, which scales more slowly than 1/3 power of yield. It doesn't scale accurately as a power yield because it is a complicated function of radiation spreading, fireball expansion and rise, radiation attenuation by air and blast suction phase hydrodynamic enhancement effects, but it is maybe equivalent over 1 kt - 1 mt to something like 1/6 or 1/5 power of yield, depending on the dose range being considered. Therefore, for initial nuclear radiation effects where people have good cheap WWII type shelters, the scaling shows that higher yield nuclear weapons have an even SMALLER equivalence to conventional weapons. You need to a tremendous number of nuclear megaton bombs to get anything like the destruction of a conventional war.

Most people looking at the destruction to the concrete buildings in Syrian cities imagine that Hiroshima was worse, but in reality 50% survived on the lower floors of concrete buildings at 0.12 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima, where most concrete buildings remained intact and shielded people from radiation, blast winds, and flying debris. The reality is that the wide areas CND claims were "vaporised" in Hiroshima were burned down hours later as a result of overturned charcoal braziers inside crowded wood frame houses, containing combustible bamboo and paper screen furnishings. That's the truth, born out in the declassified 1947 secret three volume US strategic bombing survey report on Hiroshima, ignored by Glasstone and also by CND etc. The facts need to faced to credibly deter the bigger threat, conventional warfare, which can only be stopped if nuclear deterrence is made credible by addressing sensibly the scare mongering untruths about collateral damage.

 

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All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of dDELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace": "Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.

Update (19 January 2024): Jane Corbin of BBC TV is continuing to publish ill-informed nuclear weapons capabilities nonsense debunked here since 2006 (a summary of some key evidence is linked here), e.g. her 9pm 18 Jan 2024 CND biased propaganda showpiece Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgq5/nuclear-armageddon-how-close-are-we which claims - from the standpoint of 1980s Greenham Common anti-American CND propaganda - that the world would be safer without nuclear weapons, despite the 1914-18 and 1939-45 trifles that she doesn't even bother to mention, which were only ended with nuclear deterrence. Moreover, she doesn't mention the BBC's Feb 1927 WMD exaggerating broadcast by Noel-Baker which used the false claim that there is no defence against mass destruction by gas bombs to argue for UK disarmament, something that later won him a Nobel Peace Prize and helped ensure the UK had no deterrent against the Nazis until too late to set off WWII (Nobel peace prizes were also awarded to others for lying, too, for instance Norman Angell whose pre-WWI book The Great Illusion helped ensure Britain's 1914 Liberal party Cabinet procrastinated on deciding what to do if Belgium was invaded, and thus failed deter the Kaiser from triggering the First World War!). The whole basis of her show was to edit out any realism whatsoever regarding the topic which is the title of her programme! No surprise there, then. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia are currently designing the W93 nuclear warhead for SLBM's to replace the older W76 and W88, and what she should do next time is to address the key issue of what that design should be to deter dictators without risking escalation via collateral damage: "To enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of our nuclear forces as directed in the 2018 NPR, we will pursue two supplemental capabilities to existing U.S. nuclear forces: a low-yield SLBM warhead (W76-2) capability and a modern nuclear sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) to address regional deterrence challenges that have resulted from increasing Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. These supplemental capabilities are necessary to correct any misperception an adversary can escalate their way to victory, and ensure our ability to provide a strategic deterrent. Russia’s increased reliance on non-treaty accountable strategic and theater nuclear weapons and evolving doctrine of limited first-use in a regional conflict, give evidence of the increased possibility of Russia’s employment of nuclear weapons. ... The NNSA took efforts in 2019 to address a gap identified in the 2018 NPR by converting a small number of W76-1s into the W76-2 low-yield variant. ... In 2019, our weapon modernization programs saw a setback when reliability issues emerged with commercial off-the-shelf non-nuclear components intended for the W88 Alteration 370 program and the B61-12 LEP. ... Finally, another just-in-time program is the W80-4 LEP, which remains in synchronized development with the LRSO delivery system. ... The Nuclear Weapons Council has established a requirement for the W93 ... If deterrence fails, our combat-ready force is prepared now to deliver a decisive response anywhere on the globe ..." - Testimony of Commander Charles Richard, US Strategic Command, to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 13 Feb 2020. This issue of how to use nuclear weapons safely to deter major provocations that escalate to horrific wars is surely is the key issue humanity should be concerned with, not the CND time-machine of returning to a non-nuclear 1914 or 1939! Corbin doesn't address it; she uses debunked old propaganda tactics to avoid the real issues and the key facts.

For example, Corbin quotes only half a sentence by Kennedy in his TV speech of 22 October 1962: "it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States", and omits the second half of the sentence, which concludes: "requiring a full retalitory response upon the Soviet Union." Kennedy was clearly using US nuclear superiority in 1962 to deter Khrushchev from allowing the Castro regime to start any nuclear war with America! By chopping up Kennedy's sentence, Corbin juggles the true facts of history to meet the CND agenda of "disarm or be annihilated." Another trick is her decision to uncritically interview CND biased anti-civil defense fanatics like the man (Professor Freedman) who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995! Massey reported to me that Freedman claimed civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which he claims is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper: "for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this by increasing the number of attacking weapons", which completely ignores the Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect."