"But the immense ease with which the data can be shuffled by machine has seduced him. Model after model springs to mind before the huge ink-blot of correlation matrices. He must test them, cautiously, carefully. ... On the superstition that reduction to number is the same as abstraction, it permits any arbitrary assemblage of data to be mined for relations that can then be named and reified in the same way as Fritz Mauthner once imagined that myths arise. ... Our sales representatives, trained in your tribal taboos, will call on you shortly. You have no choice but to buy. For this is the new rationalism, the new messiah, the new Church, and the new Dark Ages come upon us."
- Jerome Y. Lettvin, The Second Dark Ages, paper given at the UNESCO Symposium on "Culture and Science", Paris, 6-10 September 1971 (in Robin Clarke, Notes for the Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, pp. 141-50).
War statistics deceptions
Above: the perils of extrapolation are two-fold. This table is from Ivan A. Getting’s article, “Halting the Inflationary Spiral of Death” (published in Air Force/Space Digest, April 1963 issue), which claims a total of just 5.4 million war dead in 198 wars during the period 1820-99. Clearly this conflicts with the Taiping Rebellion in China of 1851-64, where 20 million were killed.
The Taiping Rebellion was a widespread civil war in southern China from 1850 to 1864, led by heterodox Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, against the ruling Qing Dynasty. About 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history.
The data fiddles seem to be due to Quaker, Lewis F. Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels pacifist propaganda, based on just 70 or so books about wars since 1820. Did he accidentally anc conveniently (for his politics) bodge his statistics through ignorance, or did he deliberately force the casualty data to fit an exponential rise, in order to support disarmament propaganda popular due to the tremendous destruction that he experienced in WWI, and then claimed that the more money is spent on am arms race in peacetime, the worst the state of that country after a war? This applied to the Kaiser's Germany before and after WWI, but Richardson's lesson (basically an extension of the popular but lying Great Illusion thesis of Sir Normal Angell, where nobody can profit from war or commit genocide so we don't need to fear disarming and peacefully surrendering to the nth Reich, as discussed in a previous post) proved disastrous for Britain in the 1930s.
Like fellow pacifist Lord Philip Noel-Baker, Richardson refused to learn the lessons of appeasement and arms race failure on the 1930s, and continued promoting his disproved arms race thesis when the Cold War began! Dr Quincey Wright’s A Study of War, 2nd ed., 1965, extends much further back in history. Getting’s extrapolations from his false data predicted 360 million deaths in WWIII before 1999, and 3.6 billion dead from WWIV before 2050. These extrapolations from false non-nuclear casualty data proved to be very handy statistics for the nuclear disarmament and CND lobby, with Robin Clarke publishing Getting’s false data table as the frontispiece to his 1971 book The Science of War and Peace, accompanied by an introduction in which Clarke claimed on page 11 that the rise of human population is similar to the alleged rise of war victims:
The Earth's population, now around 3,500 million people, seems bound to double by the end of the century ... A precisely similar line of reasoning leads us to expect that in the second half of this century more than 400 million people (about 10 percent of the Earth's population) will be killed in about 120 wars. The largest of these wars will alone claim ten times as many victims as did World War I and II together: some 360 million people - more than now live in the whole of Africa - will be swept off the face of the Earth.
The essential deception is the subjective definition of a war as “legally declared or involving over 50,000 troops” (reference: Robin Clarke, The Science of War and Peace, Jonathan Cape, London, 1971, page 227). Talking about legality in the context of war is missing the point that most wars are started due to laws in the first place, since not everybody accepts the legality of laws imposed by dictatorships or quangos of lawyers: laws rather than weapons are the basis for many wars. So if you have a civil war or rebellion where one side is essentially unarmed and is massacred, it doesn’t count to the pacifists who set up their definition of warfare to suit their own biases. Similarly, the 40 million starved to death by Stalin and the 6 million Hitler gassed using hydrogen cyanide are judged “peaceful” ethnic cleansing, not an inhumane barbaric warfare. The problem for the pacifist is never “peaceful” genocide, it’s always guns in the hands of those who oppose genocide. It’s always hot blooded war, not cold blooded genocide in gas chambers or concentration camps. The reason is pretty obvious: they have to think that way, or their disarmament argument disappears.
Hitler's Reichstag fire method of imposing groupthink by means of Nazi-style intimidating coercion
1. Invent a fake "risk" or "threat", complete with fake "evidence".
2. Invent a fake solution to the fake "risk" or "threat".
3. Widely publish the lying exaggerations of the fake "risk" or "threat".
4. Denounce and censor out all dissent, calling it evil or insane "risk-taking".
5. Drum up pressure on politicians to "act now" against the fake "risk" or "threat".
As we saw in the previous post, this lying Nazi propaganda and coercion method was never robustly debunked for the fraud it is, but instead was worshipped by wannabe dictators of "democratic politics". Like the war-addicted German Prussian "General Staff" concept, which led to two World Wars and terrible defeats in both, it was soon adopted by the West along with German V1 cruise missiles, V2 rockets, plus other impressive-looking but militarily-defective horseshit, including nerve gas and scare mongering over environmentalism for pristine lebensraum (thus the disposal of "unnatural" or "defective" humanity in concentration camps or gas chambers). Nazi CO
The sitting duck assumption in offensive weapons effects exaggerations
When a new weapon is used effectively in surprise against an unwarned population for the first time, the effects can be devastating. As explained in detail in the previous post, this occurred with aerial bombing of London by early German bombers in July 1917, before Government duck and cover advice had been distributed, to avoid casualties from flying glass and bodily translation by the blast winds of the explosions. Very simple civil defence such as duck and cover reduced WWII casualty rates by a massive factor. Whereas a ton of TNT could kill over 120 people standing behind windows or in the open, casualty rates for people lying down to escape blast wind drag, or ducking and covering under strong tables indoors - even when their houses collapsed on top of them - were as much as a hundred times smaller. The situation in Hiroshima was just the same: the high casualty rate was due to the exploitation of the element of surprise by pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, who explains in his autobiography The Tibbets Story how he was experienced with the immense problems of achieving anything significant from conventional bombing raids, and the need to exploit the surprise effect to end the war quickly.
Let's continue with Clarke's 1971 book The Science of War and Peace. Clarke on page 212 explains Ernest Hass's November 1968 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argument for a global movement against the "common enemy" of a coming ice age (that was before the consensus of ignorant opinion switched from "global dimming" and thus fear-mongering about a looming ice age, to fear-mongering about CO2 heat death):
Even if the threat of the next ice age is not imminent, Dr Hass suggests, we will lose little and gain much by fighting this common enemy. 'Why should we not replace the present args race among nations with a common fight against a global opponent?' he asks. 'If we actually have to expect the next ice age, we will have won first prize with this change of attitude. Even if the Antarctic ice cap does not show any tendency toward sliding into the ocean, it will have caused us to utilize huge invested means, presently completely unproductive, for the expansion or the improvement of our common living space [the Nazi demand for lebensraum].'
Dr Hass's article, "Common Enemy Sought ... and Found?" in the November 1968 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is the application of Hitler's Mein Kampf lebensraum demand, complete with defensive propaganda to ensure exaggerated threats and lying arguments, similar to the Reichstag fire that Hitler used to consolidate power and cut down all potential opponents (the lefties of course try to tarnish Dubya with 9/11 as a Reichstag Fire type excuse for the war on terror, but it does't wash; it's the fascists who excuse terrorists). It's wrong because deliberate exaggerations for propaganda are "ends-justify-the-means" fanaticism, which is precisely the evil lying that ends in horror, and spending billions on a false threat diverts money to egotistical megalomaniacs from where it is needed now to provide clean water, sanitation, and other simple foundations for humanity like sustainable farming. Lying for propaganda is a slippery slope to hell, because as in the USSR and Nazi regimes, it can only be maintained by forcefully silencing dissenters who can disprove the lies, so you end up with a paranoid Big Brother dictatorship claiming to be loved by all, when in fact it is a delusion enforced by fear and threat:
All dictatorial regimes are held together by lies, which then leads to truthful statements that the regime is under "threat" from internal and/or external dissenters. Quite so. If a dictatorial regime is built on a tissue of lies, then dissenters who expose the facts are indeed a "threat" to the regime! So dictatorships are right to claim (and fear) a "threat" from all dissenters. But the root of the problem is the lie of the dictatorship in the first place. I recently had a technical discussion with a geologist and environmental politics MA student, Martin Lack, about CO2 global pollution effects exaggerations on James Delingpole's internet site, during which Lack stated falsehoods, then claimed he didn't have time to discuss my reply, and refused to be drawn into an argument. On such subjects, it's not good enough to "agree to disagree". The details are everything, and either you get into the details, or you concede you are wrong. The problem comes when people are disproved by observation and experiment-based facts, but refuse to admit it, and simply go on believing in a faulty assumption as if it were a tenant of a dogmatic religion. If you can't accept fact over "authority" or "consensus" politics, then you're not a scientist; you've returned to metaphysics where fashionable Aristotle belief outweighs fact.
"One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi. ... Schwab had been a strong nature lover since boyhood, and by the 1920's he became very active in the emerging environmental movement in Austria. Later, he joined the Nazi Party. While this may sound odd to many who have bought into the Marxian propaganda over the years that the Nazis were right wing capitalistic extremists, greens who signed up for the Nazi Party were actually very typical of the day. The most widely represented group of people in the Nazi Party was the greens, and Guenther Schwab was just one of among many. The greens' interest in lonely places found a solitary niche in the singleness of Adolf Hitler, who ruled the Third Reich from his spectacular mountain compound, high in the Bavarian Alps called the Berghof. In English, this could easily be translated as Mountain Home, Bavaria.
"After the war in the 1950's, Guenther Schwab's brand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany. The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic 'peace' movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen. The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement. Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet.
"Later, Guenther Schwab joined the advisory panel of "The Society of Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavior Research." Schwab was especially concerned with the burgeoning population explosion of the Third World that he was sure would eventually overrun Europe. By advocating modern racial science based on genetics, Schwab believed that the population bomb, together with its associated environmental degradation, could be averted. Here, Schwab shows his basic commitment to the Nazi SS doctrine of 'blood and soil' - an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II.
"The success of Schwab's book helped him to establish an international environmental organization called "The World League for the Defense of Life." Not surprisingly, Werner Haverbeck, former Hitler Youth member and Nazi environmental leader of the Reich's League for Folk National Character and Landscape, later became the chairman of Schwab's organization. In 1973, Haverbeck blamed the environmental crisis in Germany on American capitalism. It was an unnatural colonial import that had infected Germany like a deadly foreign body.
"Both Schwab's organization and Haverbeck were also instrumental in establishing the German Green Party in 1980. Such embarrassing facts were later managed with a little housecleaning and lots of cosmetics, which was further buoyed by characterizing such greens as extreme 'right wing' ecologists - a counterintuitive label that continues to misdirect and plague all environmental studies of the Third Reich. Worst of all is that Haverbeck's wife is also a Holocaust denier.
"Long before Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," green Nazi Guenther Schwab played a large role in catalyzing the frightening theory of global warming."
- Mark Musser, "The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory", American Thinker, February 15, 2011.
"I am writing this in the middle of the night, in the middle of the conference, in the middle of a bottle of Scotch. ... My first point concerns the Apocalypse. I believe we shall soon encounter a set of world-wide crises whose gravity and nature are unique in human history. These crises have in common the properties of being (i) urgent - they get worse if not solved, and are nearing the point of irreversibility; (ii) global - no country can be assured of safety, and no country can opt out of responsibility for facing these problems; (iii) parallel -it's no good simply solving some of the problems, because the others will get you anyway: they must all be solved; (iv) connected with growth against fixed limits. There are literally hundreds of important human problems, but I think those that satisfy the criteria can be subsumed under the following categories: world order, population, environment, and resources."
- Peter Harper, Ravings of a fatigued, drunken, young ex-scientist, World Federation of Scientific Workers [Moscow's "World Peace Council"-affiliated USSR Marxist/socialist front in Western science during the Cold War], Conference on Young Scientific Workers and Contemporary Society, July 1971 (in Robin Clarke, Notes for the Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, page 115).
"Malachi Martin ... focussed on the abuse of science ... his target is the way eminent scientists, using what he calls 'the great fudge', extrapolate on slim or non-existent grounds from their own special areas to pontificate on moral and ethical matters on which they have no special competence. He is after the Skinners, the Monods, and the Desmond Morrises. And with almost wicked delight he reduces them to pulp. The fudge of which Martin complains starts with the sentence, 'If it is true that ...'. There usually follow thirty-odd pages of somewhat irrelevant and detailed science from the author's own speciality. And then, now that the 'if' has been forgotten, the scientian - as Martin calls him - goes on to summarize the human condition ... What Martin is after is perhaps best called the great confusion of the twentieth century: the confusion of science with knowledge. It is true that the word 'science' comes from a Latin one meaning 'knowledge', but ... there are many categories of knowledge - in fact most of them in man's two-million-year history - which are not scientific. ... Martin puts it better: 'Scientians ... will reimpose on man the controls from without that man has laboriously worked to shed since he discovered fire'."
- Robin Clarke, Notes for the Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, pp. 113-4.
Before anyone accuses me of taking quotations from predominantly pro-left writings on science and applying them in an unbiased argument against the corruption of science, it should be noted firstly that the nature of science isn't a matter of party politics, and secondly that there is virtually no decent unbiased literature on most of science. I know from personal experience during the Cold War that editors and publishers were biased by groupthink fashion in favour of USSR socialist collaboration, so unbiased scientific articles were routinely censored out, exterminating rather than stunting the development and nurture of generations of unbiased researchers. So we have to make the best of the biased published literature. With unbelievable anti-democratic bias, Robin Clarke writes of the Vietnam War in his introduction on page 8 of Notes for the Future:
It was the war of the largest nation against the smallest. The war of the computer against the bicycle. The war of the rich against the poor. The war of man against the land. In all these ways, Vietnam stood for more than the first American defeat. It was also the victory of people over machines and of belief over affluence. A conquering of the West by the East. It was the end of an era.
American failure in Vietnam was the success of fanatical communist liars, the Vietcong, against humanity, freedom, democracy, and progress. The failure in the Vietnam was not the failure of democratic principles, but the failure of expensive conventional and chemical warfare technology and democratic will to win a battle against a propaganda-brainwashed enemy backed by all the power of the communist block during the Cold War. The lesson to learn is that B-52 drops of about 11 megatons of conventional TNT bombs and incendiaries, plus spraying 6.2 kilotons of CS gas and 20 kilotons of herbicide 2,4,5-T over 4.5 million acres of jungle and crops in South East Asia, failed to defeat fanatical, propaganda crazed insurgents. As in WWI and WWII, the predicted knockout blow or even a loss of morale failed to occur. There is nothing like a good bombing to harden fanatical will. It's also significant that chemical toxins like the Agent Orange component 2,4,5-T (contaminated with TCDD) don't decay automatically at a fast rate like the radiation emitted from radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons (which decays faster than inversely with time after detonation). The chemicals don't have a short half life (like most of the fission products), and so will remain in the environment in significant quantities until they are chemically decomposed, which can take centuries. Whereas vegetation returned to blasted Bikini and Eniwetok Atoll islands within months of total devastation from multimegation thermonuclear tests like Mike and Bravo, and forest stands rapidly re-established themselves on the devastated, irradiated islands as the fallout decayed, the chemical weedkillers in Vietnam continue to have significant ecological and human genetic effects today!
"Never in history has so much power been used so ineffectively as in the war in Vietnam." - Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams, Arbor House, N.Y., 1985, page 45.
If America had used thermonuclear air bursts for forest blow down in Vietnam, it could have accomplished in seconds what took years using conventional and chemical weapons, and without any long-term pollution, to boot. Instead of escalating the confrontation with the USSR by a show of failure, weakness, and appeasement encouraging the massive SS-20 deployment by the USSR between 1976-88, it could have shown the toughness needed to impress and coerce the USSR into peaceful and democratic reforms long before Reagan's Star Wars. The lefty argument on the use of nuclear weapons to rapidly end war as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is always wrong for exactly the same reason: it sends out a message of weakness which encourages aggressors to escalate the war! The lefty appeasement option has an even worse alternative, namely to ignore the ferocity of the enemy and try to fight with both hands tied behind your back. This is what causes suffering, by extending the war in an effort to collaborate with fascism disguised as moral superiority. The idea of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rapidly end WWII without the mass-scale massacres of an invasion of Japan (the flavour of which was experienced in the Battle of Iwo Jima), and the saturation retaliation bombing of Germany, are considered by the pro-fascists like David Irving as the real war crimes of WWII. They clearly aren't: the war crimes are the fanatical invasions and fanatical fighting with fanatical cold-blooded genocide of POWs and ethnic minorities. A sure way to lose or multiply the suffering of war is to try to extend it by using inappropriate technology that is unsuitable for achieving a rapid victory. When fighting a war, full-scale aggression is required to encourage the enemy to surrender rapidly. As President Reagan famously explained, contrary to lefty propaganda, both sides are not equally at fault in a war of democracy versus dictatorship. Both sides are not equally moral. The immoral relativism of the left in the Cold War and Nazi era led to appeasement, which increased the risk of world war in both cases.
"I sincerely believe any arms race with the Soviet Union would act to our benefit. I believe that we can out-invent, out-research, out-develop, out-engineer, and out-produce the USSR in any area from sling shots to space weapons, and in doing so become more and more prosperous while the Soviets become progressively poorer."
- General Curtis E. LeMay, America is in Danger, Funk and Wagnalls, NY, 1968.
"So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
- President Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983.
"... the ideas of the liberal left are all so utterly impractical, stupid and wrong that none of them stands up to close scrutiny ... which is why they have to ... close down the argument ... by smearing the right-wing ... The evil genius behind this cunning strategy was an Italian Marxist called Antonio Gramsci who recognised that for the left to win ... the left needed to infiltrate the university campuses, the arts and the media and create a cultural climate in which to be right wing was not merely a political affiliation but proof positive of moral deficiency. ... Were the most prolific mass-murderers in history - Mao and Stalin - right wing? They were not. Nor, technically, was National Socialist Adolf Hitler [or the notorious Cambodian communist Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, who "cleansed" his country of 2 million people]."
- James Delingpole, How to be right, Headline, 2007, page 138.
Although the Cold War was prevented from escalating into WWIII by Reagan's decisive leadership, the USSR was coming close to it when exceeding Western nuclear power by the deployment of the SS-20 from 1976-88, together with the immense propaganda effort against the neutron bomb by its Moscow-based World Peace Council. Every year there was a certain significant risk of war. The longer the Cold War lasted via Western appeasement of the USSR, the higher the cumulative risk of war. Physiology or Medicine Nobel Laureate Professor George Wald in an anti-war speech on 4 March 1969 (Boston Globe, 8 March, 1969) stated that he asked a
"very distinguished professor of government at Harvard ... what sort of odds he would lay on the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war within the foreseeable future. 'Oh', he said comfortably, 'I think I can give you a pretty good answer to that question. I estimate the probability of full-scale nuclear war, provided that the situation remains about as it is now, at 2 percent per year.' Anybody can do the simple calculation [cumulative war probability = 1 - 0.98{time in years}] that shows that 2 percent per year means that the chance of having a full-scale nuclear war by 1990 is about one in three [i.e., 1 - 0.9820 years = 0.3], and by 2000 it is about 50-50 [i.e., 1 - 0.9830 years = 0.5]."
What these people didn't appreciate was that appeasement and disarmament was no solution to this risk, encouraging aggression and world war as it did in the 1930s; Reagan's effort to end the arms race by Star Wars and strength was not uniquely "risking war" since there was an increasing risk of war if the Cold War continued forever. The ending of the Cold War with the fall of the Warsaw Pact the the coming of democracy to Eastern Europe in 1989 was required. As Wald's estimate shows, from 1970-90 (the USSR had marshalled nuclear parity and war potential by about 1970 or so) the risk of general war may have been 30% and if the Cold War continued there would have been over 50% chance of a general nuclear war between 1970-2010.
Philip J. Dolan, co-editor with Glasstone of the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, surveyed objective estimates of the risk of nuclear war and found them lower than Wald's figure, but still significant. For his 1981 Stanford Research Institute report on effects from a nuclear war, published as Appendix A of the U.S. National Council on Radiological protection (NCRP) symposium The Control of Exposure to the Public of Ionising Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, Dolan cited an objective army calculation that estimated a 3% risk per decade, which he compared to subjective public opinion polls that forecast a risk of about 10% per decade. Nevertheless, there was a significant risk of a general nuclear war while the Cold War continued, and it was necessary to end that risk as soon as possible.
Notice that, as explained in detail in an earlier post (linked here), President Reagan's "Star Wars" plan of March 1983 was not his first option, which was civil defense. Nor was "Star Wars" a new concept: it was the rebirth of an idea developed and opposed more than two decades previously, ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile systems). In 1956, America began to contract ABM research, which led to successful tests of the Nike-Zeus ABM system at Kwajalein Atoll, which successfully intercepted missiles fired from California in 1962-3. This was a long range ABM missile, and one early argument was that the enemy could fire loads of MIRVs with "penetration-aids" such as decoy warheads, aluminium balloons, chaff (pieces of wire), and thereby clog up the defensive radar with too many "targets". However, as people like Samuel Cohen pointed out, in outer space the ABM warhead radiation (either a neutron bomb warhead or high-yield X-ray ablation warhead) has a very great range, and can effectively neutralize a vast "envelope" of space above a potential target, even if the ABM radar and computers can't identify the actual nuclear warheads within the cloud of debris. In reality, of course, heavy "penetration aids" grossly reduce the nuclear payload of an ICBM (an advantage for the defender with ABM!), while lightweight radar reflectors (like wire chaff or metallic balloons) quickly get slowed down and burned up in the atmosphere, unlike heavy nuclear warheads, so they can then be distinguished and ignored. Therefore, the Nike-Zeus system with long-range "Spartan" ABM missiles was supplemented with short-range "Sprint" ABM missiles which would intercept the warheads in the atmosphere (which filters out light penetration aids).
This was all worked out in a classified 23-volume ABM report by Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute in 1964, which took 200 analysts a year of research. President Johnson's U.S. Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, in 1967 decided to deploy a very limited form of this ABM system under the name Sentinel at a cost of $5 billion, to protect American cities against a limited or accidental attack, including a possible nuclear war with nuclear proliferation countries like China. This came under attack from former science adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Dr Jerome Wiesner, in his heavily-biased June 1967 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article The Cold War is Dead, but the Arms Race Rumbles On: "Today, the same groups that pressed Kennedy [who authorized the 1962-3 ABM tests!] to build those weapons are leading the fight for the new ABM system and using most of the same arguments." The sad result was that a campaign against ABM was launched, focussed on the claims by a group of 49 Senators led by Edward "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy that it would:
1. Not work
2. Increase the risk of nuclear accidents
3. Upset the nuclear balance
4. Lead to a new arms race
5. Cost too much
6. Increase the risk of war
7. Make talks with the Russians less likely
8. Imperil the test ban treaty
(List from page 93 of Robin Clarke, The Science of War and Peace, 1971.)
In 1969, U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird explained every argument against ABM was wrong: it was proved against limited accidental attacks or small-scale nuclear proliferation nuclear attacks and would therefore reduce the escalation risks in these events, stabilizing the nuclear balance against accidents. Since the Russians had already deployed their own ABM system to defend Moscow, it would not lead to a new arms race, but would help civil defence against any nuclear attack by limiting the number of incoming warheads that land on cities. It was dirt cheap compared to conventional warfare in Vietnam. It reduced the risk of war, by making an enemy attack less likely to succeed. It made favorable talks from a position of strength with the Russians more likely, instead of encouraging further belligerence (as Laird told a Congressional Armed Services Committee on 20 March 1969, ABM gave "the Soviet Union added incentive for productive arms control talks"). It did not imperil the nuclear test ban treaty because both the Spartan and Sprint warheads were well-established technology. It would have led to proper EMP protection of the West, a safeguard against natural solar storms as well as high altitude nuclear war. But the appeasers prevailed as cash disappeared down the drain in Vietnam. Reagan had to call the USSR an "evil empire" in 1983 to overcome the ABM haters and psychologically bankrupt the ideological lies of the already-financially bankrupt USSR.
In the 1960s, as in the 1930s, the concept of moral relativism reigned supreme, aided and abetted by the spiraling costs and casualties in the Vietnam War (the U.S. Defence Department budget rose from $47.8 billion in 1961 to $80.6 billion in 1970). The 1965 second edition of Professor Quincey Wright's A Study of War analyzed the warlikeness of 652 tribes, running to 40 chapters, 1,637 pages, 52 appendices. However, a close look at his data show that - despite the World Wars of the twentieth century - the war problem has been improving (once you take account of the world's exponentially rising population). For example, in both the 16th and 17th centuries, nations spent 65% of their time at war, but this fell to 38% in the 18th century and to just 18% in the 20th century (up to 1964), despite the two World Wars. The average duration of wars remained around 3 years, and percentage of forces killed in war actually fell from 25% in the 17th century to 15% in the 18th, 10% in the 19th, and just 6% in the 20th (up to 1964). The only reason why war deaths have gone up as a whole is the increase in the population, since the risk of death to soldiers has fallen over the years (most of the military deaths in wars before the 20th century were from diseases like cholera from contaminated water and infected minor wounds, before the advent of antibiotics, water purification, and sanitation)! Given civil defence and ABM, even aerial bombardment can be limited, and the upward trend in civilian war deaths (13% of the dead in WWI, 70% in WWII, and 84% in the Korean War) can be reversed. Lt Col Fielding L. Greaves stated in the December 1962 Military Review that 14,542 wars occurred from 3600 BC to 1962 AD, an average of 2.6 wars per year! But Wright's book gives an average of 0.63 wars per year in the 16th century, 0.64 in the 17th, 0.38 in the 18th, 0.89 in the 19th, and only 0.30 in the 20th (up to 1964).
In particular, thermonuclear weapons can never achieve the high levels of destruction inherent in the fanaticism of "primitive" guerrilla wars like the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-70, which was started off by a war against Brazil by the dictator of Paraguay (Francisco Solano López). This led to an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay on 1 May 1865 which eventually killed 83.5% of the 1.337 million population of Paraguay. López by June 1864 was outnumbered by 10 to 1, but he did not surrender and led a savage guerrilla war until he was killed on 1 March 1870.
Secret reports on nuclear weapons capabilities in the Vietnam War
Between 1966 and 1968, during the peak of the Vietnam War, [Hudson Institute founder Herman] Kahn served as a consultant to the Department of Defense and opposed the growing pressure to negotiate directly with North Vietnam, arguing that the only military solution was sharp escalation. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn
President Truman dropped two nuclear weapons on Japanese cities to rapidly end the war for humanitarian reasons, avoiding an Iwo Jima type conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands, accompanied by over a million civilian casualties. Blast and flame thrower conventional weapons are no less lethal than nuclear weapons, even after radiation exaggerations. As it was, Hiroshima convinced Stalin that the war was coming to its end, so he declared war on Japan, which tipped the balance of Japanese morale and caused them to surrender (Japan had been holding out in the hope that Russia, a traditional ally of Japan, would help negotiate a more favourable conditional surrender with America). By giving a warning to the Vietcong to evacuate forest areas ahead of nuclear clearing, a proper demilitarized zone could have been blasted through the rainforest between North and South Vietnam with megaton yield Redwing-Navajo style (5% fission yield, 95% clean) air burst weapons, allowing safe policing to avoid Vietcong invasion of the South, without the pitfall traps and ambushes inherent in the hopeless task of policing a jungle! If America wanted to defend South Vietnam, it should have used nuclear weapons for this forest blowdown purpose, creating a physical barrier between the North and the South. Otherwise, it should have given up. The disaster in Vietnam was the "King Canute effect", the political determination to go against science and win a war by relying essentially on aerial bombardment with conventional weapons, which had failed to defeat morale in WWII even in cities which lacked the continuous cover of thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest!
Above: nuclear weapons effects interested Australians helped evaluate the tree blowdown effects of nuclear weapons in a rainforest during Operation Blowdown, a joint Australian-British-American explosive test (0.05 kt on a 43 m high tower) in a rainforest at Iron Range, Northern Queensland, Australia, on 18 July 1963 to assess the dynamic pressures required for tree blowdown which could be scaled up using forest blowdown data from the 110 kt Koon and 14.8 Mt Bravo 1954 nuclear tests near forested islands in Bikini Atoll. In particular, the Australian experiment proved the difficulty in moving through the blowdown area as a function of dynamic pressure. Earlier 1950s Australian-British nuclear weapons detonations in Australia had been not provided blowdown data since they were conducted small islands at Monte Bello and to deserts at Emu Field and Maralinga (Jack R. Kelso and C. C. Clifford, Jr., Operation Blowdown, U.S. Defense Atomic Support Agency report AD0351230, June 1964).
“Senator Barry M. Goldwater’s public attempts during the 1964 presidential campaign to promote the notion of ‘conventional nuclear weapons’ ran up against the taboo. In May 1964, Goldwater argued publicly that nuclear weapons should have been used at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to defoliate trees and that, in similar fashion, ‘low-yield atomic weapons’ should be used as defoliants along South Vietnam’s borders. UN Secretary-General U Thant immediately criticized the idea while the Pentagon responded to ‘Goldwater’s folly’ by describing technical characteristics of nuclear weapons, arguing that it was absurd to call them conventional weapons. ...
“Samuel Cohen, a weapons physicist at the RAND Corporation who had advocated use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War, and who was one of the rare enthusiasts for such an option in the Vietnam War, also ran up against the taboo mindset. As he recalled, ‘anyone in the Pentagon who was caught thinking seriously of using nuclear weapons in this conflict would find his neck in the wringer in short order’.He nevertheless attempted to interest Washington in the virtues of ‘discriminate’ nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He recalled, ‘I put my mind to work on how nuclear weapons might be used to thwart the Vietcong.’ He gave a presentation on tactical nuclear weapons to key planners in the State Department in 1965, but it quickly became evident that however intrigued his audience was from a technical point of view, they were ‘adamantly opposed to the development and use of such weapons from a political point of view’. ...
“Even Henry Kissinger was forced to confront the normative limitations on material power. Although he had written a book extolling the use of tactical nuclear weapons [Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy], once in the White House he found to his regret that nuclear nations ‘could not necessarily use this power to impose their will. The capacity to destroy proved difficult to translate into a plausible threat even against countries with no capacity for retaliation.’ He attributed this to the awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons. But as Kissinger knew well, sub-kiloton weapons are not all that awesome. So he was being a little disingenuous. Further, as the willingness of the North Vietnamese to fight the United States illustrated, material power alone does not make deterrence work. One of the major lessons of Vietnam for students and practitioners of international relations has been the normative and political limits on material power. Nowhere was this illustrated more clearly than in the nonuse of nuclear weapons during the war.”
– Nina Tannenwald, “Nuclear Weapons and the Vietnam War”, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 675–722, August 2006 (quotations from pages 695-696, and 719).
On 9 April 2008, the 400-pages secret 1993 Center for Air Force History report by Victor B. Anthony and Richard R. Sexton, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The War in Northern Laos 1954-1973, ADA512223, was released. It showed that U.S. Air Force chief of staff General Thomas D. White decided to drop nuclear weapons from SAC B-47 bombers, to blow the cover of communist guerrilla insurgents in North Vietnam and Laos, using the recommendations of the U.S. Air Force report, Atomic Weapons in Limited Wars in Southeast Asia, combatting the Soviet airlift of arms to Laos via Hanoi. The recommendation was based on the failure of conventional weapons to achieve outright victory despite causing mass destruction (worse than that from the nuclear weapon detonation at Hiroshima, 1945) in the 1950-3 Korean War, as Samuel Cohen illustrated with photo comparisons in his book The Truth About the Neutron Bomb.
A Top Secret 1970 Office of Air Force History report, The Air Force in Southeast Asia: Toward a Bombing Halt, 1968, show how in January 1968, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, requested nuclear weapons to repel the North Vietnamese attack on American forces at Khe Sanh and in the demilitarised zone in the middle of Vietnam. This would have enabled America to resist and repel the impending Tet Offensive by the Vietcong! But President Johnson’s Joint Chiefs of Staff denied Air Force chief of staff General John P. McConnell’s requests for the use of nuclear weapons, even low-yield relatively clean nuclear weapons, to defend U.S. Marine bases. Instead, they were restricted to indiscriminate unsatisfactory conventional weapons, napalm, high explosive (project "Rolling Thunder"), CS gas and chemical defoliant, which failed to demoralize the Vietcong into defeat, and killed 3,600,000 people! Not only that, but Johnson publically stated that he would never use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, thereby guaranteeing to the Vietcong that America would be limited to the conventional strategic bombing which had failed to shock the leadership of Japan into prompt surrender in WWII. Only the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their political effect in pushing Stalin into finally declaring war against Japan (ending Japanese hopes that Stalin would negotiate a settlement for Japan with America), ended WWII! Political correctness still ignores war facts. When President Nixon took control in January 1969, he considered nuclear war, but wanted to peace with China, despite the fact China’s nuclear stockpile was insignificant.
Above: Fig 6.24b in the 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons: 175 trees/acre natural Pisona tree stand on Rukoji (codenamed Victor by America) Island of Bikini Atoll, subjected to 2.4 psi peak overpressure at 11.8 miles (19 km) from the 14.8 megaton Castle-Bravo thermonuclear surface burst of 1 March 1954 (see the film Military Effects Studies on Operation Castle). The range could be extended and local fallout averted by air bursting the weapon. Pisona is a beech-like broadleaf tree and those in this forest stand has an average height of 80 feet with an average stem diameter at its base of 3 feet. This nuclear test (the largest American nuclear test ever) also produced light tree damage (no stem breakage, just 30% branch breakage) to a Pisonia forest on Eniirikku (codenamed Uncle by America) Island, 75,400 feet or about 14 miles from ground zero, where the peak overpressure was 1.7 psi, according to page 28 of W. L. Fons and Theodore G. Storey, Operation Castle, Project 3.3, Blast Effects on Tree Stand, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Division of Fire Research, Secret - Restricted Data, report WT-921, March 1955. For information on the use of nuclear weapons for safe, cost-efficient anti-insurgency in jungles, please see section 11, Forest Stands, in Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Washington, D.C., technical manual TM 23-200, November 1957, Confidential, and its 1981 update, Chapter 15, Damage to Forest Stands, in the Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, Stanford Research Institute, Secret.
Above: one of the best tested and proved military uses of nuclear weapons, apart from ending World War and preventing a World War, is counter-insurgency against guerrillas taking cover in forests. This photo from the 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons shows the tropical Pisonia forest blowdown effects at Eniirikku (Uncle codename) Island in Bikini Atoll, some 9,300 feet from a 110 kiloton yield thermonuclear surface burst, Operation Castle shot Koon in 1954. This is similar to American beech forests with a mean tree height of 50 feet and a mean diameter at the stem base of 2 feet (American nuclear weapon test report WT-921 states that at 8,800 feet from this test, where the peak overpressure was 4.2 psi, some 58% of trees were snapped; the location and details behind the Glasstone 1957 photo above are identified in Figure 3.8 on page 38 of report WT-921).
The blow-down effect rapidly (in seconds) stops and demoralizes jungle insurgents over terrific areas, without the guaranteed massacre from sending ground-troops in to the jungles to be killed or incapacitated by excrement-spiked poles in pitfall traps, mosquito carried diseases, and ambush. Using this weapon in Vietnam, instead of President Johnson's open statement "we will not use nuclear weapons in Vietnam", could have quickly demoralized the insurgents. For low-fission yield (relatively clean), Navajo-like designs, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission during the Vietnam war quoted a price of just $600,000 per 2-megaton thermonuclear weapon (see Glasstone's 1967 Sourcebook on Atomic Energy and Calder's 1968 book Unless Peace Comes, page 47). It was a dirt cheap way to cleanly and humanely convince the North Vietnamese to surrender. Instead, Americans gave in to political correctness, fought effectively with both hands tied behind their backs, damaged their economy, lost the war, and set off a wave of communist expansion unseen since the late 1940s. Using nuclear weapons for blowdown in Vietnam would have preserved the environment, cheaply escalated the arms race, bankrupting the USSR into reform sooner, demoralized the lefty self-aggrandising, politically-correct Stalinists throughout the world's media and lefty culture, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars for use making the world a better place, with clean water and sanitation for all. The trees grew back rapidly after nuclear explosions because the fallout automatically decays faster than inversely with time after detonation, leaving a pristine environment, unlike chemical defoliants like agent orange! (Health benefits of low dose rate radiation hormesis are proved later on in this post, below.)
Above: President Johnson exploited nuclear fear and civil defense apathy in this famous 1964 election campaign TV ad, supposedly showing a young girl being blinded by the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, instead of taking Bert the Turtle's "duck and cover" advice! This deceptive scare-mongering in politics proved a vote winner over factual evidence, just as groupthink fashions always do. Result: during the Vietnam war President Johnson had to keep issuing public statements reassuring the evil commies (Vietcong) that he would not use nuclear weapons (see, for instance, Reagan's criticisms of Johnson's statements included in appendices of the 1982 book With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War). If he had gone in for nuclear forest blowdown to create a impenetrable belt between the North and the South in Vietnam, the leaf cover would have absorbed the thermal flash, thus preventing any skin flash burns even in kids who didn't duck and cover. Instead, he chose to try to nepalm the kids instead, which caused deeper burns than a nuclear flash, and hardened enemy resolve, instead of convincing them to surrender.
Notice that the tropical forest was not ignited due to the humidity; it did not burn contrary to anti-civil defense lies which are popularized by propaganda. As we explained in a previous post, an error was made in analyzing firestorm ignition at Hiroshima, where thermal radiation was blamed due to ignorance of humidity effects on ignitions in dry Nevada desert nuclear tests. Humidity in air is much higher in tropical forests, coastal cities and cities built around rivers than in dry deserts. This had a big effect both on thermal flash transmission through the air (infrared radiation is absorbed by humid air very efficiently), and on the ability of the the thermal radiation to cause a sustained ignition. If you expose thin damp paper to an intense thermal pulse, it can penetrate far enough to start to dry out the paper and ignite it before the pulse ends. But the thermal pulse cannot dry out thick damp wood. Therefore, it causes a few leaves to "smoke" and burn, but they are unable to cause sustained ignition or firespread.
"... more than 10 billion pounds of TNT was dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II, this equalled more than 50 pounds for every man, woman and child. ... Arithmetically considered, the result should have been the total annihilation of one and all. ... During the Vietnam War, more than 25 billion pounds of TNT were dropped ... an average of 730 pounds for each of a total population of 34 million. ... yet the USA was unable to kill enough people, or to disrupt economic life, transportation or communication sufficiently."
- Senator Foy D. Kohler, Foreword to Leon Gouré's War Survival in Soviet Strategy (Centre for Advanced International Studies, Miami, Florida, 1976, p. xv).
"I think we're going to have to start a civil defense program. ... the United States should never put itself in a position, as it has many times, of guaranteeing to an enemy or a potential enemy what it won't do. ... President Johnson, in the Vietnam War, kept over and over again insisting, oh no, no, no we'll never use nuclear weapons in Vietnam ... the Soviet Union has used propaganda campaigns to stop us from putting a weapon that we - a great deterrent weapon - that we had developed and they didn't have - and an economical weapon - and that was the neutron warhead. They've got more than 20,000 tanks massed there opposite the NATO line. The neutron warhead could have neutralized those tanks but again we stopped it ... Woodrow Wilson ran for his second term on the promise or the pledge that he kept us out of wars. ... he took insult after insult ... finally the Germans declared open warfare on all shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, regardless of whether you were a neutral nation or not. And the Lusitania was sunk and, finally, we were in a war. ... the Kaiser got the idea from ... the policy that the United States was determined not to go to war. So he ignored that possibility ... Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for his third term, and ran on his own personal promise, 'I will not send young Americans, your sons, to fight.' ... you've got an ambassador who is assuring von Ribbentrop that the United States wouldn't go to war ... Hitler at this time said, we can count on it ... the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. ... I say that we are going to war ... backing away from the Soviet Union. We will one day find ourselves pushed to the point where there is no retreat and we have no further choice."
- Ronald Reagan, interviewed by Robert Scheer in 1980, pages 233-58 of Scheer's With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983.
Above: the Secret report by Freeman Dyson, Robert Gomer, Steven Weinberg, and S. Courtenay Wright, Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia, Study S-266, Jason Division, DAHC 15-67C-0011, Washington DC, March 1967 (declassified in December 2002), wrongly used the civil defence (not military capabilities) unclassified nuclear weapons compendium by Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, where it should have used the secret military nuclear weapons effects compendium, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons. It therefore uses guesswork about forest blowdown effects, ignoring essentially all of the hard-won secret data from extensive experiments at nuclear tests and after blast blowdown in the Australian rainforest. After ignoring forest blowdown data by inventing false and spurious guesses, it then launches a strawman dismissal of nuclear weapons capabilities by showing problems with low-yield tactical nuclear effects on personnel in the open, airfields, bridges, and tunnel systems. Page 1 states misleadingly: “Among both military experts and the general public, there is wide agreement that the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia would offer the U.S. no military advantage commensurate with its political cost.” Page 13 states: “TWN of higher yield are extremely effective in blowing down trees. ... The main weakness of tree blowdown as a method of interdiction is that a tree can only be blown down once.” There is no justification given for needing to blow down trees more than once! The report claims that the enemy can easily “cut a new trail through the fallen trunks”, ignoring the fact that the purpose of blowdown is to remove cover. Anyone trying to cut a path through tree trunks of fallen trees would be exposed to aerial view, and could be easily stopped and deterred! This is simply ignored by the report, which also ignores the effect on morale, and the cost-effectiveness of nuclear weapons (relatively clean 2 megaton warheads for $600,000 each works out at 30 cents per ton of TNT equivalent!). Page 14 falsely claims: “Men could climb over the trees and work independently of outside supplies.” Even ignoring morale defeat, the authors totally ignore the petrol supply and parts required by chainsaws, the difficulty and time taken to cut a path through the blown down trees, and the fact that such people would be “sitting duck” targets while they were doing that, taking months.
Air burst fallout elimination facts
Above: in an air burst there is a delay between detonation and the first entry of dust into the fireball, if indeed any dust enters at all. The mushroom stem and skirts in the 1962 Dominic air burst above is composed of pure water vapour due to low altitude humid air, which has been sucked up in the afterwinds to higher altitudes, expanding, cooling, and thus condensing into visible white fog. It has never mixed with fireball fission products and is uncontaminated, not fallout. If the fireball has time to buoyantly transform from a sphere into a hollow doughnut or "toroid" before the dust stem enters it, the afterwind swept-up dust will avoid contact with the radioactive fireball completely, and will merely travel up through the hollow middle, around the top, and cascade back over the sides without mixing with the fireball and becoming contaminated, as shown by the following photo of the Buster-Charlie nuclear air burst in the Nevada (14 kilotons, 30 October 1951):
Above: the lack of significant fallout contamination from air burst neutron bombs and forest blowdown weapons proved by both nuclear test data and computer simulations of dust sweep up by the afterwinds. "HOB" is height of burst, F1 is American nuclear test air burst data curve for the integrated 24 hour dose rate pattern ("early fallout"), expressed as a fraction of that from a land surface burst, with burst height H feet and weapon yield W kilotons as the variables. Thus, F1 = 1 for zero height of burst, but is F1 = 0.1 for either a 1 kiloton air burst at 186 feet (56.7 metres) altitude, or a 1 megaton air burst at 1,860 feet (567 metres) altitude. Hence, the dose rates within the early (24 hour deposition) fallout pattern are reduced by a factor of ten relative to a surface burst for these altitudes; protection factors against early fallout increase at least exponentially with burst altitude! Because 72% of the fission products have half-lives less than 24 hours, and the decay rate of fallout as a whole is proportional to time-1.2, the absence of local fallout allows a great deal of radioactive decay and dispersion in the atmosphere, reducing the hazard. Essentially all of the non-local fallout is due to particles so small that they have a negligible dry fall-out rate and are deposited instead with rainfall after they eventually mix with rainclouds. This fallout goes straight down the drain.
F2 is the fallout height-of-burst effect scaling law given on page 5-97 (Problem 5-12) in Chapter 5 of Philip J. Dolan's 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, based on the theory that the fraction of local fallout is equal to the fraction of the fireball volume which intersects the Earth's surface at final thermal maximum. This formula was included by Dolan in his October 1973 draft revision of the 3rd edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, but was deleted from the final 1977 published version co-edited with Glasstone after the new analysis of atmospheric nuclear test data and fallout sweep-up was done. As the graph above shows, Dolan's formula closely matches the fraction of debris mixed with dust within about 14 seconds of a 200 kiloton air burst. After this time, the cooling of the fission products in the fireball reduces their adherence to incoming particles of mushroom stem dust which are being sucked into the cloud. In addition, the formation of the hollow mushroom "toroid" by this time ensures that most future incoming dust travels through the hole in the middle of the toroid and then cascades back around the outside, without ever having the opportunity to mix vigorously with the fission products!
This fact-based mechanism for the lack of early fallout from air bursts was usually asserted rather than rigorously explained or proved in books like The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, due to secrecy concerning the nuclear test data on fallout patterns from air bursts. This, and public confusion over neutron induced activity and the soot rainout after the air burst over Hiroshima (which occurred due to firestorm convection, long after the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown downwind) led to a widespread skepticism in the safe, clean nuclear detonations. In a land surface burst on dry soil or rock, the mechanical break up of the ground in cratering action produces a power-law distribution of different particle sizes, with the number of particles proportional to the inverse of the fourth power of the size. This law is valid down to a radius of about half a micron.
But in an air burst or an ocean surface burst, the particle size distribution follows a log-normal distribution, with particle radius as the variable, because the particles are due to the sweep-up of surface dust or spray in the afterwinds of the mushroom stem, not an intimate mixing with crater ejecta. An air burst or sea water surface burst also limits the maximum size of the fallout particles, which reduces the dose rates upwind and near ground zero by a large factor compared to those from a land surface burst.
With the log-normal distribution, the dose rates from fallout at ground zero are lower, but they fall off more slowly with increasing downwind distance than in the case of the surface burst power-law distribution model, where dose rates near ground zero are very high, but fall off faster with increasing downwind distance. Fractionation also affects the rate of variation of dose rate with downwind distance, because the distribution of radioactivity is not proportional to particle abundance, but depends on the volatility of each decay chain. Volatile decay chains include the important nuclides I-131, Cs-137, and Sr-90, which deposit preferentially on very smaller particles that remain in the cloud for long periods, and are depleted relative to the fission product mixture as a whole on the large particles that fall-out quickly near ground zero. Therefore, fractionation of these volatile decay chains means that their abundance varies as a weaker function of downwind distance than that of non-fractionated (refractory) fission products like Zr-95, Nb-95, and Mo-99.
Eco-fascist lies, fallout radiation, Vietnam War weed-killers, and the green politics
Above: the use of agent orange in Vietnam helped push Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring exaggerated environmentalism bestseller on to the political agenda, such as this 1972 film Silent Running about the preservation of Earth's forests in a spaceship, to allow reforestation of the planet after environmental catastrophe, led by a brave botanist and ecologist. Actually, Carson's scare-mongering about life-promoting insectiside DDT (which stopped typhus epidemics spreading in WWII) destroying the bottom of the food-chain and killing all life on earth by preventing insect pollination of plants, were soon proved fake, and the ban on DDT was lifted by the World Health Organization on 15 September 2006 because it's the most environmentally cost-effective mosquito control for preventing the spread of malaria and yellow fever. Exponential growth applies to both population and resources. As to the rise in human population, the extra population is an extra resource, so there is no problem. It's only when you falsely claim (as Mathus did in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1972 set up as a computer program by the Club of Rome) that population rises exponentially but food production increases linearly, that you can make doomsday predictions! In 1974, the Club of Rome published its second report, Mankind at the Turning Point: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over population, food shortages, non-renewable resource depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.” It concluded: “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” The delusion in their computer program (used to obfuscate the errors), was the old one by Mathus: using an exponentially rising population but a more slowly rising rate of resources and food production! This was pointed out by Dr Allen Kneese and Dr Ronald Riker and reported in Newsweek, 13 March 1972, page 103.
Silent Running: Science-Fiction Story With Cheerful Robots
By VINCENT CANBY
New York Times, April 1, 1972
The year is 2008, sometime after the earth has been defoliated, its valleys filled in and its mountains leveled, when it's 75° everywhere from Murmansk to Tanzania, and when everyone has a job. It is, in short, hell, at least to Freeman Lowell, the chief astro-botanist on the American Airlines space freighter Valley Forge, one of three space freighters cruising like arks in the vicinity of Saturn. The ships are a task force of giant greenhouses in which earth's vanished plant life is being preserved until the day of refoliation.
Similar hysterical delusions were simultaneously entering the war science literature, so the great Herman Kahn and his Hudson Institute exposed their myths:
With the easing of nuclear tensions during the détente years of the 1970s, Kahn turned his attention to futurism, with its speculations about a potential Armageddon. The Hudson Institute sought to refute popular apocalyptic essays such as Paul Ehrlich's “The Population Bomb” (1968), Garrett Hardin's similarly reasoned “The Tragedy of the Commons”, published in the same year, and the Club of Rome's “Limits to Growth” (1972). In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress; the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future. In his last few years, Kahn wrote approvingly of Ronald Reagan's political agenda in The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, and bluntly derided Jonathan Schell's claims about the long-term effects of nuclear war. Kahn's 1976 book The Next 200 Years, written with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176. -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn
Robin Clarke's 1971 The Science of War and Peace on page 207 quotes the diary entry of Duchess of Marlborough, Sarah Churchill (1660-1744): "His Grace returned from the wars today and pleasured me twice in his top boots." He there claims that war is the biological urge for the "release of aggression". This rubbish leads on the next page to an analogy between avoiding war and avoiding your mother-in-law. On page 225, he draws an analogy between war and the disease cholera: remove the source of the disease and the problem goes away. The problem is that the cause of the disease of war is inhumanity, not the means to defend yourself from genocidal regimes like Hitler or Stalin. You don't remove the source of "war disease" by disarming yourself, but by disarming the dictator, which requires arms.
On page 248, Clarke reaches rock bottom by claiming that Nostradamus' book The Centuries in 1555 predicted a Soviet-American alliance, rather than the fall of the Soviet Union: "he also predicted the Berlin Wall, as well as trouble over land in the Middle East, and the installation of a 'cold thing' (Polaris missiles?) in Scotland. 'One day', he wrote, 'the two great leaders shall be friends. Those of the Arctic Pole shall be united together. There shall be in the East great fear and dread.' Nostradamus clearly predicted a Soviet-American alliance and he also predicted a war between it and China three years and seven months after the alliance was formed. This from a man who in the sixteenth century foresaw the rise to power of 'Un Empereur naistra pres d'Italie called Napoloron and a German captain called Hister!"
Then on page 271, Clarke claims that the Cold War is analogous to the 139 years arms race between the Roman and Persian empires (363-502 AD), which accidentally ended in a full scale war that lasted a century and permanently degraded each empire: "If you want peace, prepare for war, has been the untested, unproven, and often disastrous policy of nearly every great civilization of the past." It is true that there was a risk of global war while the Cold War lasted, but Clarke ignores the argument of LeMay in his 1968 book America in Danger, that an arms race can produce economic defeat against the less democratic side, the USSR. There were those who wanted the arms race to achieve nothing, appeasement, or even friendship, to be a "stable balance of terror" forever, but that wasn't what LeMay and Reagan were after. They didn't want economic stability in the arms race: they wanted victory through winning the arms race, and they succeeded for the first time in history - winning an arms race by economically bankrupting their opponent.
Finally, Clarke gives some suggestions for avoiding war on pages 286-8 of The Science of War and Peace. Having ignored Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War by simply quoting the ignorant, ill-informed ad hominem attack on Kahn in mathematically ignorant pseudo-mathematician and lawyer James R. Newman's lying "review" of Kahn's book in the March 1961 Scientific American, Clarke states on page 286: "Over the past decade, the Journal of Conflict Resolution has published the ideas of more than a hundred specialists in this field. For the most part, their articles have been as obscure as they are long, as confusing as they are enlightening. If the germ of some bold new idea for resolving conflict lies hidden in this literature, I have been unable to find it."
Then Clark decides on page 287 that the best "theoretically well-defined" idea for avoiding war is Australian Dr John Burton's approach at the Centre for the Analysis of Conflict at University College, London: "nations behave as they want to in ways which they judge best and it is useless to try to impose artificial constraints on them; internationa law, for instance, will work only so far as it coincides with a nation's own desires - and if a nation chooses to break the law, it will [economic sanctions, "ridicule", "shaming", protests, etc., failed to reform the illegality of genocide by the USSR, the Nazis, Pol Pot in Cambodia, etc., since by definition, dictatorships don't conform to democratic principles of decency!]. Hence Dr Burton has little time for the League of Nations or the UN Security Council [trying to get a consensus on taking practical tough military action to stop genocide in advance is, as Herman Kahn showed in On Thermonuclear War, unfeasible since you never get consensus on tough action and so the only way for international law to have stopped Hitler would have been if there was a mechanism in place for automatic military action to have been taken when Hitler began his invasions, not endless "jaw jar not war war" discussions by scared appeasers]. He has even less time for ideas of world government - arguing rather that nations should be made smaller so that their peoples can participate more actively in politics.
"Dr Burton's theories of conflict are based on the mirror image idea and on the fundamental assumption that no nation behaves aggressively - ever. Nations, he claims, are by their nature non-aggressive. But they often believe their enemies are aggressive. When Israel makes a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, it is because she fears Egyptian aggression. When she clings on to the territory gained, it is not because she is aggressive but because she is saying to Egypt that there is now a bargaining position from which Egypt can learn to accept the fact of Israel's existence. Even Hitler's actions, it can be argued, may be better explained by reference to the conditions that existed in Germany during the years 1910 to 1930 than by attributing to the German nation some generalized aggressive urge in the late 1930s. ... aggression - if it really exists at all - is a response to the environment rather than an innate drive. ... The means of resolving conflicts is to let participants reach their own agreements, with no outside coercion. To effect this the two sides muct be brought into active and prolonged discussion so that they break down their mirror images of each other's position."
This is precisely what Prime Minister Chamberlain did in flying twice to have lengthy face-to-face personal discussions with Adolf Hitler in 1938, and he reached agreements with Hitler, proudly waving the "peace in our time" paper with his and Hitler's signature on it to a crowd of cheerers at Heston Airport and then waving with the Royal Family from the balcony of Buckingham Palace! What Clarke and Burton ignore is that any fool can avoid war. Avoiding war is easy, politically correct, cheap in terms of requiring no arms, and popular with the thugs. Even if a war starts, either side can stop immediately at any time by waving a white flag. Game over. The issue is genocide, the human (not financial) cost of war. Humanity. Chamberlain didn't want to declare war on Hitler in September 1939! Hitler didn't declare war on England! Neither leader wanted war at that time. Neither was aggressive towards the other at that time. Hitler wanted to invade the whole world without a world war, he was prepared with only a 6-week munitions supply for a series of short wars of invasion, not a world war. Chamberlain declared war first, not because he was aggressive, but because his Cabinet threatened to resign and humiliate him if he didn't at last declare war on the racist thugs.
No pacifist will listen to that because they're self-brainwashed by groupthink, they're determined that their egotistic, megalomanic Marxist or Nazi style eco-eugenics "ends justify the means" fanaticism by definition justifies whatever they choose to do in the name of political correctness. These thugs, the Marxist/Nazi elitists who look down at all critics as if they are immoral by definition, all pretend war is about "aggression", weapons, military spending, arms races, science. Nope. War has always been about inhumanity. War is easy to prevent, stop, and end. Wave a white flag. Of course, the reason people don't wave the white flag is inhumanity: they fear the "peaceful" life under the enemy's ethnic cleansing regime more than they fear fighting. Himmler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein. Genocide didn't begin and end at Auschwitz, Anne Frank didn't die in a gas chamber but in a concentration camp from neglect, and this genocide problem goes on despite the best efforts of the BBC, Godwin, and the Guardian to distance the Nazi holocaust from modern day "ethnic cleansing". Don't you believe it. Saddam in 1988 used nerve gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja killing thousands of civilians when he believed wrongly that the Kurds were helping the Iranians. Who supplied the precursor nerve gas chemicals to Saddam? Yes of course, as Fredrick Forsyth points out, the same company that supplied the Zyklon-B to Himmler for the Nazi gas chambers:
LIBYA... AND OTHER EVIL DESPOTS THE WEST SUPPORTED
Daily Express, Friday 4 March 2011
By Frederick Forsyth
THE great and good of the entire West are squeezing tears from their hankies over the slaughter that has gone on in Libya. And quite right too.
My problem, or one of them, is that I have a long memory. I recall that in the mid-Seventies in Uganda, Idi Amin butchered thousands of innocents. Our establishment managed to tut-tut for a while but nothing was done to stop him. It was Julius Nyerere of Tanzania who did that.
After coming to power in 1980 Robert Mugabe sent his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland where they slaughtered 5,000 of the once-proud warriors who were his political opponents, along with their wives and children. But the Great & Good were so consumed with post-colonial guilt that the tyrant could do no wrong. Like Idi Amin ...
In 1988 Saddam Hussein rained poison gas bombs on the Kurdish town of Halabja because he was told (wrongly) that the Kurds were helping his enemies, the Iranians.
Up to 5,000 died but Iraq was at war at the time with the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini, our enemy, so the establishment managed to restrain its tears for the Kurds. After all we were arming Saddam.
Anyway the precursor chemicals for the gas were sold to Saddam by the same German company that once provided Zyklon-B to Herr Himmler to help him cope with the problem of too many European Jews. So our G&G kept quiet about that too.
On page 20 of his 1971 The Science of War and Peace, Robin Clarke writes: "But in the last analysis, as we shall see, the real problem is not to prevent wars but to eliminate the discontent that causes them." Discontent is a political problem, due to a lack of proper democracy, a lack of public facts, a lack of competent leadership that defends itself with proper scientific facts and debate.
"A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favourite topic: man's unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how ... the rabbits that formerly kept such [brush] growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbit's destruction of crops. ... I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176 ... All forms of life modify their contexts. The most spectacular and benign instance is doubtless the coral polyp. By serving its own ends, it has created a vast undersea world favorable to thousands of other kinds of animals and plants. Ever since man became a numerous species he has affected his environment notably. The hypothesis that his fire-drive method of hunting created the world's grasslands and helped to exterminate the monster mammals of the Pleistocene from much of the globe is plausible, if not proved."
- Lynn White, Jr., The historical roots of our ecological crisis, Science, vol. 155, 10 March 1967, pp. 1203-7.
The mainstream groupthink deception over radiation hormesis
Robin Clarke ignorantly asserts on page 9 of his 1975 book Notes for the Future: "the lethal 'side-effects' of radiation from a nuclear reactor are not so different from those of the bomb itself, except in scale."
So let's explore the history of censorship of the dependence of dose rate on the effects of radiation, called hormesis. The effects at Hiroshima and Rongelap were due to extremely high doses received at extremely high dose rates which prevented DNA repair enzymes to repair the double stand breaks as they occurred (which occurs at lower dose rates), while Chernobyl's widespread effects were provably due to radiophobia - the simply false reporting of natural cancer and natural genetic effects as due to radiation, often "justified" by non-existent, inappropriate, or poorly-diagnosed "unexposed control groups". If you diagnose 100% of the natural cancer in an irradiated group but only 50% of the cancer in a "control group", then you will claim that the risk of cancer in the irradiated group is double that in the unexposed "control group", when it's simply a difference in diagnosis rates due to the radiophobia-induced hypochondria. The irradiated, scare-mongered group will be more likely to report any possible cancer symptoms than the unirradiated group.
Above: low dose rates of radiation stimulate growth in mice, evidence of radiation hormesis (from Dr T. D. Luckey, Radiation Hormesis Overview, lecture given at ICONE-7, Tokyo, April, 1999). We discussed the source of errors in the mainstream linear, no-threshold extrapolations from Hiroshima and Nagasaki data in previous posts: they apply to very high dose rates (initial nuclear radiation received over a period of seconds), and are extrapolated downwards using the linear law of genetic effects in non-mammalian, short-lived insects (Muller's fruit flies), and also plants like maize. Insects and plants like maize don't live for decades before reproduction, so they don't acquire significant doses of natural background radiation, and they don't need to evolve DNA repair enzymes (unlike mammals which produce relatively few offspring after a period measures in decades). So the present radiation dose standards are based on a false radiation effects model from insects and plants (dating back to anti-nuclear bias by Edward Lewis in 1957 Congressional Hearings on fallout, as documented in detail in previous posts), which must be revised to take account of mammalian DNA repair enzyme (e.g., protein P53) stimulation as a form of cancer prevention at low dose rates. This stimulation is akin to overcompensation by muscles to regular exercise: an increased rate of DNA breakage leads the body to devote more metabolism to DNA repair enzymes like protein P53, which overcompensates. You reduce the cancer risk by devoting additional energy to DNA repair enzymes than is normally used in that manner, an analogy to reducing a fire risk by spending more money on fire sprinkler systems or fire resistant materials, as Dr Jeffrey Moss explains in the video about hormesis below:
Above: hormesis is dose rate dependent, not just dose dependent! Radiation or chemical induced double strand DNA breaks occurring at a rate faster than they can be repaired by DNA repair enzymes in cell nuclei (such as protein P53) results in a net increase in cancer risk, while lower dose rates can stimulate the whole DNA repair enzyme system to repair breaks more efficiently than they do naturally. This is seen clearly in skin cancer, from high dose rates of ultraviolet radiation. See also the posts here and here.
Above: the loss of naivety in dose-response relationships. The optimum curve, effect probability = e-bA - e-cA, represents the stimulation of the DNA repair enzyme system by radiation dose rate A. At high dose rates, the DNA repair enzyme system is itself damaged by and unable to function efficiently, but at lower dose rates it is stimulated by radiation into working faster. However, historically the discovery of DNA repair enzymes only date from the 1970s, and data on non-linear radiation effects from earlier periods was ruthlessly censored (mainly by anti-nuclear fallout political propaganda and scare-mongering) in deference the simplest idea, the linear dose-effecs law, where effects are supposedly directly proportional to causes. However, you soon learn in most medicines that increasing the dose of a vitamin or other drug doesn't actually improve the effect without limit. Either a saturation point is produced, beyond which subsequent doses are simply wasted, or - worse - an overdose produces smaller benefits than lower doses! E.g., if the overdose side-effects of a massive dose from aspirin kill most people by internal bleeding, then the overall beneficial effect of increasing the dose drops when the optimum dose rate is exceeded, instead of either increasing or remaining constant! Although the mathematical theory of natural exponents which produce the realistic dose-effects curves have been known for a long time (the constants are easy to fix from the linear law for very small doses, and from experimental data on large doses), there is an Orwellian "doublethink" or "crimestop" brainwashing system in place in groupthink science dogma hype, which prefers to endlessly promote false linear laws. To get the facts to "fit" such false laws, the data is fiddled by the simple process of natural selection: disregarding as "suspect" any data that doesn't conform to the mainstream reigning science dogma and bias! Exactly the same mechanism led to a gradual evolution of experimental measurements of fundamental constants like the electronic charge (an episode which Feynman called shameful): the first investigators made errors but were revered. Subsequent investigators were awed by the first investigators, and feared any data which diverged too far from it. So they deleted as "suspect" most of the correct data, being biased in favour of incorrect figures that confirmed the mainstream prejudice! Only in gradual steps, paper after paper, did the consensus shift towards the correct values.
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