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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

x_t = [A/(fM)] {integration symbol} [sin(f t)] (P_t + C_Dq_t) 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, P_t is the overpressure at time t, C_D is the drag coefficient of the building to wind pressure (C_D = 1.2 for a rectangular building), and q_t is the dynamic pressure at time t.

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

E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ. 

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

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

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

Glasstone’s nuclear effects handbook, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating factually:

“… the structures … have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection.

“The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings.”

This was removed from future editions. This isn’t speculative guesswork: it’s down to the conservation of energy.  Penney published the experimental proof from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1970, after being made a Lord and FRS:

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

Above: for a 1 kt air burst at height H feet, the Mach stem height at ground distance R feet is given by approximately ( R – H ) ² / ( R + 7.4  x 10^-5 H ³ ) feet ± 20%, for distances R > H.  (Our equation is based on the Mach stem height graphs given in TM 23-200 and DNA-EM-1. This is Nevada desert data for unobstructed terrain.  This equation thus ignores terrain and building effects on the development of the Mach stem.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Car crashes due to bright flashes

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

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

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

  In addition, key V1 effects data from Christopherson’s Structural Defence 1945 (Ministry of Home Security research report RC-450) proved that over 75% of people survived house collapse, given quick “duck and cover” under tables in WWII, a fact that was included in Table 6.1 in Confidential American manual TM 23-200 Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, 1957, and Table 10-1 in Secret American manual DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, 1972.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) the cube-root distance scaling which means that blast casualty areas only scale as the two-thirds power of yield (i.e. the casualties per ton of TNT equivalent aren’t proportional to total yield of an explosion, to the two thirds power of yield per unit yield, which using the law of indices results in the casualties per ton being proportional to 1 / [cube root of yield]), and

(2) bigger yields which produce larger areas of destruction increase the mean time between the flash and the blast arrival over the serious blast area, allowing more time for duck and cover against blast wind displacement and flying debris.  The “overkill” concept is also bogus for the strategic and tactical reasons linked here (there is no “theoretical limit” to how many people a single stick or stone could kill, so you could say that any rock could in theory kill everyone in the universe; the practical limitations are simply more obvious with a rock than a nuclear weapon due to widespread ignorance of the true limitations and physics of the latter).

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The authors of AWRE-T57/58 (which was the basis for the agricultural fallout sections in the UK 1959 and 1974 Nuclear Weapons civil defence book published by HMSO):

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/513207/Robert-Scott-Russell

Robert Scott Russell

British botanist and mountaineer, became in 1957 the first director of the Agricultural Research Council Radiobiological Laboratory, a facility in the U.K. established to monitor and predict the consequences of nuclear fallout on food crops and human nutrition. He studied at Imperial College in England and in 1938 joined the college’s expedition to the Arctic island of Jan Mayen. There, along with research on the effects of the Arctic climate on plant metabolism, he reached the summit of the previously unclimbed northeast peak of the extinct volcano Beerenberg, thereby renewing the enthusiasm for climbing that he had developed during his boyhood in New Zealand (b. Feb. 14, 1913, Penge, Eng.—d. July 29, 1999, Wantage, Eng.)

John Freeman Loutit CBE FRS^[1] FRCP Also known as ‘Ian’. (19 February 1910 – 11 June 1992) was an Australian haematologist and radiobiologist. … He contributed significantly to the development of improved techniques for the storage and transfusion of blood during the Second World War. After the war he became a leading researcher in the then novel field of radiobiology. He established and ran the Medical Research Council’s Radiobiology Unit at Harwell from 1947 to 1969. He gave the 1969 Bradshaw Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on the subject of malignancies caused by radium. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1963.^[1] His candidature citation read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above: at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcast the admission: “This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would

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

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

Update (30 October 2013):

Over a month before the Damascus sarin nerve gas attack that killed 1,300 civilians, Foreign Secretary William Hague on 16 July 2013, British Foreign Secretary issued a written statement to Parliament which stated: “There is evidence of attacks using chemical weapons in Syria – including sarin. We believe that the use of chemical weapons is sanctioned and ordered by the Assad regime. … We plan to equip the moderate armed opposition with 5000 escape hoods, nerve-agent pre-treatment tablets (NAPs) and chemical weapons detector paper.”What he could have done was to have prepared civilian kids using civil defence. Sarin is liquid droplets which at typical ambient temperatures take 3 times longer to evaporate than water droplets of similar size. Britain’s Porton Down in the 1970s proved how to keep sarin droplets and their vapour out of houses with blast-broken windows, using a simple, DIRT-CHEAP, duct-tape-and-plastic-sheeting method which was proof-tested against simulated nerve and blister gas liquid contaminants! The actual method is very simple and was first tested and employed in 1917 by America in gas-proofed trenches. (Page 14 of the Confidential-classified American manual of 1917, “Defensive Measures Against Gas Attacks”, states: “The value of gas-proof dugouts and cellars has been clearly demonstrated. This should be borne in mind in view of the inflammation of the skin produced by mustard gas.”) In 1937, the government published a 7-page printed report on experiments to determine the effectiveness of anti-gas protection of houses and of people wearing gas masks or not wearing gas masks in sealed rooms. (I’ve put it on the Internet Archive at:http://archive.org/stream/AirRaidsWhatYouMustKnowWhatYouMustDo/AirRaidsHandbook#page/n141/mode/2up together with some of the updated research proving that nerve liquids can be kept out the same way, while it evaporates, plus declassified effective civil defence evidence for other weapons than can be used in war.) This Experiments in Anti-Gas Protection of Houses ARP report was published by the Home Office Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Department to disprove fears circulated by various critics in 1937 (especially the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group which published a book claiming to entirely discredit all air raid precautions), that the gas masks and gas proof rooms did not work, were unreliable, or were just armchair advice invented to support anti-Nazi warmongering rather than appeasement policies:

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

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

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

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

“The animals in the ‘gas protected’ room, however, were unaffected and remained normal, nothwithstanding the severity of the trial.”

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: The blast, heat and radiation are easily shielded by modern concrete jungles, and thus all the effects are highly survivable with simple proof-tested “duck and cover”, contrary to terrorism-supporting propaganda.

6 November 2013: The “population bomb” eugenics liars supported by the compulsory licence funded BBC

While we’re rooting out eugenicists, like Stalin’s corrupt communists who murdered 40 million in collectivization in the 1930s (far more than Hitler’s 6 million which is more widely hyped by the left than Stalin’s “success”), and the evil Medical Nobel Laureate and gas chamber eugenics fascist Dr Alexis Carrell, let’s look at an article written recently by Fredrick Forsyth about propaganda from a BBC ideologue and why it’s totally false:

“IT IS CORRUPTION, NOT OVER-POPULATION, THAT IS STARVING THE WORLD’S POOR

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

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

From the BBC’s Useful Idiots program: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/07/100624_doc_useful_idiots_lenin.shtml

“In 1952 Doris Lessing, a British writer who has since won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was part of a delegation visiting the Soviet Union. Her memories of the trip are clear and unforgiving: “I was taken around and shown things as a ‘useful idiot’… that’s what my role was.” … Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and American journalist Walter Duranty were some of those people who also visited the Soviet Union. However as stories mounted of mass murder and starvation in parts of Russia and the Ukraine, reporters such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge investigated and reported on ‘the creation of one enormous Belsen’. Duranty responded with an article in the New York Times headed ‘Story of the famine is bunk’, and got an exclusive interview with Stalin. Soon after, Jones died and Muggeridge’s career nose-dived. Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer.”

The point is, as with Duranty, when there are two sides to any story, the BBC and Guardian newspaper unfailingly manage to swallow the liars propaganda (hook, line and sinker), thus taking the wrong side. The simple answer is that these pseudo-intellectuals find fiction more appealing than facts. They prefer utopian hopeful fantasies to tough reality. They are ideologues who want to believe in contrived propaganda that reinforces their ideals.

UPDATE (10 Nov. 2013):

 

Professor Hans Rosling has an article in the 6 Nov. 2013 Spectator, stating:

Don’t panic! There’s no population bomb

Hans Rosling 6 November 2013 17:32

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

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

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

 Here’s another question we posed to British people: what’s the literacy rate of the world — 20, 40, 60 or 80 percent? Half chose 20 and 40 percent, nearly 45 percent of them chose 60 percent, and only 8 percent picked 80 percent. The answer, of course, is 80 percent (and rising). Four-fifths of the world can read and write, and thus hold the means to pull themselves out of poverty. You see? Our perception of things is very different from the reality.

I am not an optimist, but I do call myself a possiblist. And I say the world is much better than many think.

Prof. Hans Rosling’s graph of population: the number of kids (under 15 years old) on this planet peaked at 2 billion in 2000 and has not risen since then, because the population growth was just due to medical advances that increased childhood survival and lifespan.  The continued increase in total population is  due to a temporary lack of sync between births and deaths, due to increasing lifespan.  By about 2100 (provided that nobody produces a cheap effective cure for cancer, heart disease, etc.) the total population will stabilize at 11 billion (less than twice today’s 7 billion).  Most of the increase will be Africa, where technology has time (87 years) to politically reintroduce DDT to kill off the malarial mosquitoes and make capitalist civilization succeed and provide a high standard of living.  (The eco-eugenicists would prefer to wipe out the “excess humans” by reintroducing lions or other pests, therefore they tend to either “slow handclap” or scream to drown out the voice of anybody who tells the unfashionable truth.)

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

 

 

 

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

The film and injuries show the directions of bullets that proved important (if bullets were fired by others, they missed).  Newton’s 3rd law of motion predicts correctly the so-called “unexplained” backward motion of a head hit with a bullet: the shock wave pressure of a bullet in cerebral fluid material causes material to be ejected from the large exit hole (front of head), thus the head recoils backwards, in the opposite direction to this material (as predicted by Newton’s 3rd law of motion: action and reaction are equal and opposite).  There is no mystery unless you ignore this key, well proved law of physics!

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

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

The reason why such conspiracy theories continue is the use of authoritative assertion rather than rational justification for the facts.  The prejudiced, physics ignorant, popular media forms a propaganda lobby, analogous to the moon deniers.  Media censorship of physics prevents the facts being discussed:

President John F. Kennedy

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

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

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

Delingpole’s new book on Ecofacism will be published in December 2013.  “Godwin’s law” states that we must avoid any analogy of the 1920s Brownshirts to modern fascists, until after a full holocaust in the name of eugenics pseudoscience.

Plausible-sounding consensus lying triumphs over scientific objectivity and facts because it tells people what they want to hear, which is not the truth!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This record is closed and retained by Ministry of Defence

Retained by Department under Section 3.4

Former references:

in its original department:   T57/58

Legal status:

Public Record

Closure status:

Closed Or Retained Document, Open Description

Access conditions:

Retained by Department under Section 3.4″

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

CAB 196/25

Description:

Book on civil defence by Peter Laurie (‘Beneath the City Streets’)

Date:

1970 Mar 03 – 1970 Oct 26

Held by:

Creating government department or its successor, not available at the The National Archives

Former references:

in its original department:   M/1/19

Legal status:

Public Record

Closure status:

Closed Or Retained Document, Open Description

Access conditions:

Retained by Department under Section 3.4

Closure criterion:

Retained in departments on security or other specified grounds

Lord chancellor’s instrument:

LCI 113 – Series containing retention instruments

LCI signed date:

2013 September 18

Reconsideration due in:

2023

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

The UK Home Office scientists Laurie spoke to (who in 1967 included George Stanbury and Frank Pavry, both veterans of Britain’s first nuclear test explosion at Monte Bello in 1952, where they successfully proved the validity of cheap World War II civil defence shelters against nuclear blast, heat and nuclear radiation; Pavry had also surveyed shelters surviving in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 since he was part of the British Mission to Japan) explained the “shadowing effect” of modern hi-rise city skylines (unlike Hiroshima or the Nevada desert) as the thermal burns and thermal firestorm/nuclear winter prevention mechanism:

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

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

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

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