The main purpose of discussing the radiated EMP from a surface burst is, as already emphasised, not concerned with EMP damage but with the detection and identification of nuclear explosions by computerised radio receivers such as the British 'AWDREY' (atomic weapons detection, recognition, and estimation of yield) installations which have been developed since 1968 by the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and can automatically use the EMP to immediately detect and identify the characteristics of a nuclear explosion. To cover Britain, there were 13 AWDREY installations each with 75 miles operational range. The direction of the EMP measured by any two AWDREY's allowed the coordinates of the burst to be determined, while the time measured from the EMP radioflash to the final maximum pulse in the visible light flash of the explosion was used to accurately determine the total energy yield of the detonation. To discriminate against lightning and other false alarms, a detonation was only recorded by the instrument if there was both an EMP and a visible light flash with the nuclear explosion signature waveforms.

(References: V.E. Bryson, et al., "Weapons Effects Testing, EM Pulse, Project 6.1", Boeing Company, Operation Dominic II, weapon test report WT-2226, June 1963, Secret - Restricted Data. Paul A. Caldwell, et al., "Magnetic Loop Measurements, Project 6.2", Harry Diamond Laboratories, Operation Dominic II, weapon test report WT-2227, February 1965, Secret - Restricted Data. R.W. Frame, "Electromagnetic Pulse Current Transients, Project 6.5", Sandia Corporation, Operation Dominic II, weapon test report WT-2230, October 1963. D.B. Dinger, "Response of Electrical Power Systems to Electromagnetic Effects of Nuclear Detonations, Project 7.5", U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Laboratories, Operation Dominic II, weapon test report WT-2241, June 1963.) According to the 'DTRA Factsheet on Operation Dominic II' : 'Operation DOMINIC II was an atmospheric nuclear test series conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) from July 7-17, 1962. The operation consisted of four low-yield shots, three of which were near-surface detonations and one a tower shot. One of the near-surface shots was fired from a DAVY CROCKETT rocket launcher as part of Exercise IVY FLATS, the only military training exercise conducted at DOMINIC II. An estimated 3,900 Department of Defense (DoD) personnel participated in Exercise IVY FLATS, scientific and diagnostic tests, and support activities. The series was intended to provide information on weapons effects and to test the effectiveness of the DAVY CROCKETT weapon system under simulated tactical conditions. Also known by the DoD code name of Operation SUNBEAM, DOMINIC II was the continental phase of DOMINIC I, the atmospheric nuclear test series conducted at the Pacific Proving Ground from April to November 1962. ... 'The scientific tests at DOMINIC II were supervised by the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA) Weapons Effects Test Group. These tests were designed to collect information on weapons effects, such as the electromagnetic pulse, prompt and residual radiation, and thermal radiation. The experiments also tested the effects of low-yield detonations on structures and on aircraft in flight. ... 'The event involving the largest number of DoD participants was Shot LITTLE FELLER I, the fourth DOMINIC II test. LITTLE FELLER I was a stockpile DAVY CROCKETT tactical weapon, fired as part of Exercise IVY FLATS. This training exercise consisted of an observer program and a troop maneuver. Observers in bleachers about 3.5 kilometers southwest of ground zero wore protective goggles while they watched the detonation. Maneuver troops forward of the observation site were in trenches during the detonation. Five personnel from the IVY FLATS maneuver task force launched the weapon from a rocket launcher mounted on an armored personnel carrier. LITTLE FELLER I detonated on target, 2,853 meters from the firing position. ... 'The DOMINIC II event involving the largest number of DoD projects was Shot SMALL BOY. Originally scheduled for 31 DoD projects, the shot ultimately included 63 DoD projects, as well as four Civil Effects and 31 AEC projects. Shot SMALL BOY had initially been planned as the one detonation of Operation DOMINIC II. The primary purpose of the detonation was to provide information on electromagnetic pulse effects. Headquarters, DASA, consequently assigned Harry Diamond Laboratories, which had collected electromagnetic pulse data at Operation PLUMBBOB (1957), to provide overall technical direction for DoD programs. Program 6, Electromagnetic Effects, was given priority over the other programs, which were conducted according to strict guidelines designed to assure noninterference with Program 6 objectives. [Emphasis added: note that SMALL BOY was primarily an EMP effects test, which indicates the priority being given to EMP in 1962!]' OLDER MATERIAL (NEEDS EDITING): One of the immediately perplexing things about the radiated EMP or radioflash signal from a nuclear explosion in the American treatment e.g. DNA-EM-1 chapter 7 is the talk of a 'source region' or 'deposition region' boundary, symbolized by R 0 , which doesn't actually exist in the physical world! The radiation fields drop off gradually so there is no natural limiting distance! This problem is resolved clearly by an arbitrary definition of the radius, as explained by Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons , 3rd ed., 1977, page 535 : 'the deposition region does not have a precise boundary, but R 0 is taken as the distance that encloses a volume in which the [peak air] conductivity is 10 -7 mho [1 mho = 1 S in SI units] per metre or greater.' The Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons Chapter 7, 1978 Change 1 page 7-7 et seq says that the radiated EMP electric field strength at this radius varies from 1,300 v/m for 1 kt surface burst to 1,670 v/m for 10 Mt surface burst, but "For most cases, a value of 1,650 volts per metre may be assumed. At ranges along the surface beyond R 0 , the peak radiated electric field varies inversely with the distance from the burst." Dolan then gives examples of surface burst radiated EMP: for 100 kt at a ground distance equal to the deposition region radius for this yield of R 0 = 5.8 km you get about 1,650 volts/metre radiated EMP, and for 1 Mt at the deposition region radius R 0 = 7.2 km, you also get about 1,650 volts/metre. Scaling inversely as distance, Dolan shows that at 10 km ground range, the radiated EMP peak electric field is about 950 v/m for 100 kt surface burst and about 1,200 v/m for 1 Mt. These are small electric fields from the perspective of EMP damage concerns, although they will induce large current pulses in long conductors. One important point to notice is that the radiated EMP from a surface burst is vertically polarized (a horizontally propagating transverse wave) so it poses a threat to long vertical conductors like radio masts, not to long horizontal conductors like telephone or power cables. The source region radial electric field is horizontally polarized (radially directed, not transverse) so it causes the threat to horizontal cables and power lines, etc. In the event of a high altitude nuclear explosion, the EMP radiated downwards is polarized predominantly in the horizontal direction, so it is picked up in horizontal cables and power lines. The radiated EMP from a surface burst, apart from being relatively weak, has the wrong polarization to cause significant pick up in horizontally laid conductors, so it is not a primary damage threat. As for the waveform of the radiated EMP from a surface burst, it's easy to get this by integrating the upward (vertical vector) component of all the Compton (electron) currents in the air above the detonation, and using this net vertical current to calculate the radiated waveform of the EMP, just as you can calculate the radiated radio waveform from a known electron current applied in a vertical antenna or aerial by a radio transmitter set. Radio waves are radiated whenever a net electric current varies with time. I.e., whenever there is a net acceleration of electric charge, as given by Larmor's simple formula for radiated power: P = q 2 a 2 /{6*Pi*Permittivity of free space*c 3 } watts, where q is charge and a is the acceleration of that charge. However, Larmor's formula needs relativistic corrections (see equation 8 in Mario Rabinowitz's paper ) which for circular (constant pitch and radius) deflection makes their velocity vector perpendicular to their acceleration vector, giving v * a = 0, so the relativistic correction to Larmor's formula amounts to multiplying it by {gamma} 4 , where {gamma} = [1 - (v/c) 2 ] -1/2 , the relativistic Lorentz-FitzGerald factor: P = q 2 a 2 [1 - (v/c) -2 ] 2 /{6*Pi*Permittivity of free space*c 3 } watts, This is confirmed by Professor Bridgman's Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects (1st edition, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA/DTRIAC), July 2001), equation 11-3 on page 376, where acceleration a 2 in the Larmor non-relativistic equation is replaced by {gamma} 2 (dp/dt) 2 /m 2 , where m is the electron's rest mass, with the note that the relativistic "gamma" factor must also be included in the expression for momentum p (due to the relativistic mass-increase which enhances that momentum at relativistic velocities). This relativistic correction, {gamma} 2 (dp/dt) 2 /m 2 = {gamma} 4 (dv/dt) 2 = {gamma} 4 a 2 , which is identical to Rabinowitz's relativistic correction to Larmor's formula. (Bridgman cites the source of his formula 11-3 as John David Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics , Wiley, New York, 2nd ed., 1975, pages 660-5.) Because a bigger bomb releases more gamma radiation which causes the vertical Compton current, it is clear that the time taken for the vertical electron Compton current to be cancelled out by the conduction current (the return of mobile negative electrons to inert heavy positive ions of air molecules, caused by the radial electric field caused by the charge separation which attracts them back to the ions) gets longer for bigger bombs. At 10 km from a 1 Mt surface burst, it appears that the peak electric field should be -1,200 v/m at 0.5 microsecond (the negative sign comes from the fact that this is due to the Compton current, which is a net upward flow of electrons, i.e., equivalent to a downward flow of conventional electric current which is defined after Franklin as flowing from positive to negative not the other way around as really occurs) which rapidly drops to zero at 1.3 microseconds and is then followed by a reversed electric field peaking at +110 v/m at about 2 microseconds (the positive sign being due to this field being caused by the net flow of electrons downward, returning to ions). In the case of a 1 Mt air burst in sea level air, the radiated electric field at 10 km range is much weaker because the EMP is due to the air density gradient, but it has the same general nature as for a surface burst, peaking first in the negative direction with -19 v/m at 0.75 microsecond due to the Compton current, followed by a positive peak of +23 v/m at 3 microseconds due to the conduction current (returning electrons). There is some nuclear test data available in declassified preliminary shot reports on the U.S. Department of Energy Marshall Islands Historical Documents database, giving some values for the radiated EMP electric field strengths measured for various Ivy (1952), Castle (1954) and Redwing (1956) Pacific nuclear tests, which can be compared to the theoretical predictions in DNA-EM-1: King, 500 kt pure fission low air burst (451 m altitude): peak EMP at Maui (4200 km distance) = 1.0 v/m Romeo, 11 Mt 64% fission surface burst: peak EMP at 320 km distance = 21 v/m Koon, 110 kt 91% fission surface burst: peak EMP at 320 km distance = 15 v/m Union, 6.9 Mt 72% fissin surface burst: peak EMP at 320 km distance = 40 v/m Yankee, 13.5 Mt 52% fission surface burst: peak EMP at 320 km distance = 34 v/m Nectar, 1.69 Mt 80% fission surface burst: peak EMP at 23 km distance = 775 v/m Zuni, 3.53 Mt 15% fission surface burst: peak EMP at 334 km distance = 14.4 v/m Flathead, 365 kt 73% fission surface burst: peak EMP at 343 km distance = 17.0 v/m; also the measured peak EMP at 525 km distance was 6.8 v/m Osage, 1.7 kt 100% fission low air burst (204 m altitude): peak EMP at 13.5 km distance = 26 v/m Seminole, 13.7 kt 80% fission burst inside a large water tank: peak EMP at 33.4 km distance = 0 v/m (no detectable EMP, due to the water blanket above the bomb in the water tank absorbing the nuclear radiation and preventing any effective EMP being generated) The references for these data cited in the preliminary shot reports on that database are: M.H. Olseon, Operation Castle, Project 7.1, Electromagnetic Radiation Calibration, weapon test report WT-930, June 1958, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons project, Secret-Restricted Data, and Charles J. Ong, Analysis of Electromagnetic Pulse Produced by Nuclear Explosions , Operation Redwing, Project 6.5, 1956, Secret-Restricted Data. The Dolan DNA-EM-1 manual chapter 7 is fairly accurate for Koon, Union, Yankee, and Nectar but generally over-estimates the peak electric field from these nuclear tests by about a factor of two, partly because the assessment of prompt gamma radiation output it uses is based on more efficient nuclear weapons with thinner casings than the 1950s test devices, and partly because at a distance of 320 km from a nuclear bomb there is some attenuation in the EMP radiation due to the ocean conductivity and the atomsphere, in addition to the purely geometrical effect of the inverse-of-distance fall off. The formula given by Dolan is probably only accurate within 50 km of a surface burst, and exaggerates the EMP at greater distances.

On 7 July 1962 the 0.022 kt plutonium bomb test 3 feet above the ground in Nevada, Little Feller II, was documented for determining EMP induced damage effects (rather than merely the waveform for weapons diagnostics or the detection/location of nuclear tests or bomb attacks) for the first time in American testing history (although in 1957 Harry Diamond had measured the magnetic field component of EMP from Operation Plumbbob in Nevada for the purpose of assessing whether EMP would set off magnetic mines, they were not concerned with EMP damage to electronics). It was a standard U.S. Army tactical 'Davy Crockett' miniature nuclear bomb. An electric cable buried at a depth of 30 cm was located from 15 metres of ground zero radially outwards, and the induced EMP current pulse in the cable was measured at various distances by digital meters which saved their data on protected magnetic tape recorders. This experiment was repeated at the 0.5 kt Johnie Boy U-235 bomb test on 11 July 1962, which was detonated 58 cm underground. On 14 July 1962, the 1.65 kt plutonium bomb test Small Boy detonated 10 feet above ground was instrumented to document a complete set of EMP waveforms for radial and transverse electric field, azimuth magnetic field, and the air conductivity variation with time at distances of 190 to 3000 metres from ground zero.

Following on from the reported EMP pick up at the fourth French test in the Sahara, three Nevada surface bursts in 1962 attempted to document EMP ground fields and cable currents, to varying degrees of success (there were many instrument problems).

Although close in EMP damage and distant ‘radio-flash’ (clicks on radio sets) were experienced at the Trinity nuclear test in 1945 and the Sandstone tests in 1948, regular measurements of the EMP waveforms from nuclear tests only began in 1951 at Operation Buster-Jangle in the Nevada desert. M.H. Oleson was in charge of Project 7.1, ‘Electromagnetic Effects from Atomic Explosions’ which was maintained throughout Operations Tumble-Snapper (report WT-537, 1953), Upshot-Knothole (report WT-762, 1955), Ivy (report WT-644, 1958), and Castle (report WT-930, 1958).

Russian data on EMP had come not from measuring the EMP by photographing the pulse on oscilloscope screens like American and British work, but by measuring the distance sparks would jump over spark gaps, and by assessing the burn out of electronic equipment. So Russian work was concerned with directly measuring end effect of induced current EMP pulses, not the sophisticated measurements of the free field EMP waveforms radiated in the air by the explosions. The stimulus of the Russian article in December 1958 coincided with the first secret British-American exchange of EMP data that same month (although the English translation of Kompaneets paper was not published until June 1959 in J. Exptl. Theoret. Phys. (Soviet Physics JETP), volume 35, No. 6, June 1959, page 1076), which paved the way for the Minuteman missile system to be protected against EMP in 1960, the very first American military system to be designed to withstand EMP!

In December 1958, Russian scientist A.S. Kompaneets published openly a theory of “Radio Emission from a Nuclear Explosion” (Zh. Eksperim. I Teor. Fiz., Vol. 35, pp. 1538-42 ), which was later discredited by Dr Victor Gilinsky of the RAND Corporation in California , because Kompaneets actually ignored the Compton current (which is the essential mechanism!) and only calculated the effect of the late ionic current in air (which is insignificant and of positive polarity), so that Kompaneets’ predicted EMP waveform misses out the massive fast-rising negative electric field due to the Compton current, and only features the small, delayed, positive electric field due to the ionic current!

One of the major problems in generalizing EMP pickup into conductors from the source region is that the EMP coupling into cables depends on the ground permittivity or dielectric constant and the conductivity of the ground, which are both dependent upon the EMP wave frequency, depending very strongly on the moisture and salt content of the soil, a problem first analysed fully by Smith and Longmire in the October 1975 report A Universal Impedance for Soils , DNA 3788T . Longmire has also written a brief and simple account of another EMP problem, the System Generated EMP, SGEMP or 'Direct Interaction' EMP, caused by nuclear radiation striking electrical and electronic systems and inducing EMP pulses directly without the mediation of EMP fields: Direct Interaction Effects in EMP , DNA 3249T, 1974 . THE RADIATED EMP AT GREAT DISTANCES FROM AN AIR BURST AND FROM A SURFACE BURST FIRST OPEN RUSSIAN PUBLICATION ABOUT NUCLEAR BOMB EMP IN 1958 The declassification of the existence of radiated EMP/radioflash for the 1962 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (the first edition to mention it) was finally triggered by Russia! It was the fact that Russia was concerned with EMP damage that forced America to start taking the threat seriously and to do detailed investigations, getting E.G. & G. to write the report on EMP damage in nuclear tests.

“Electromagnetic Radiation. A large electrical signal is produced by a nuclear weapon detonation. The signal consists of a rather sharp transient signal with a strong frequency component in the neighborhood of 15 kilocycles. Field strengths greater than 1 volt per metre have been detected from megaton yield weapons at a distance of about 2,000 miles. Electronic equipment which responds to rapid, short duration transients can be expected to be actuated by pickup of this electrical noise.” Notice that they are completely ignoring the source region cable EMP pick-up problem that E. G. and G. had identified with nuclear tests since 1948 in the Pacific (Operation Sandstone cable-controlled tower bursts) and 1951 (Nevada cable-controlled Sugar shot, etc.), and just commenting on the long-distance radiated EMP as an 'electrical noise' problem! The source-region radial EMP in a surface burst or near surface burst is on the order of 100,000 v/m, and it is the pick-up of this EMP which induces massive currents in cables that then disperse it outside the source region. The radiated EMP outside the source region is weak so it has nothing to do with the damage problem in low altitude bursts! So EMP information was stuck with the people dealing with EMP damage in cables, and it wasn't even getting into the classified manual! The major reference on the physics of cable pick-up from the source-region which is cited by Dolan's DNA-EM-1 secret manual is Dr Conrad L. Longmire's report Ground Fields and Cable Currents Produced by Electromagnetic Pulse from a Surface Nuclear Burst , DASA 1913, DASIAC SR-54, Defense Atomic Support Agency, March 1968. It is clear that the partitioning of secret departments in the 1950s was responsible for nuclear test data on EMP damage not being widely recognised as a civil defence and also a military problem until the 1960s when substantial funds were allocated to do serious research into EMP mechanisms for damaging effects.

Most of the interest in EMP in 1951 by the military was in the use of the radiated radioflash EMP - the well known click on radio receivers when a nuclear bomb flash goes off - as a convenient electronic means to remotely detect and identify a nuclear explosion, which has nothing to do with the damaging effects of EMP piped out of the source region by conductors like cables. Even as late as 1957, only a very brief single-paragraph discussion of EMP pick-up effects from low altitude and surface bursts occurs in the November 1957 edition of the Confidential (classified) U.S. Department of Defense, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project manual TM 23-200, Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, section 12, “Miscellaneous Radiation Damage Criteria”, page 12-2, paragraph 12.2c:

The bomb control cables from the Sugar test explosion were apparently fused together by over 1000 Amperes at 0.5 mile distance, and the electric EMP power surge in the cable caused a lot of damage at the control point 30 miles away, arching over porcelain cutouts, fusing the contacts of relays together, driving meters off-scale, and apparently escaping by cable cros-talk into other circuits including into the power grid and tripping distant circuit breakers in Las Vegas some 90 miles from the burst. As a result, all further cable-controlled tests at Nevada had to take the precautions of switching off mains power at the Nevada control point at shot time and running the telephone system and other equipment off diesel generators to prevent the EMP power surge escaping into cables to the national power grid. Technicians were also warned over the loudspeaker during the countdown to 'Standby to reset circuit breakers' after the EMP at shot time. Nevada EMP facts are documented in a 'Secret-Restricted Data' report dated 30 April 1961 by B. J. Stralser of E. G. and G. (Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier) - which was responsible for doing the countdowns and firing systems at American nuclear tests - called 'Electromagnetic Effects from Nuclear Tests'. E.G.G. were famous for high-speed photography and its associated electronic timing circuits, and it was in this connection that the company was recruited by the Manhattan Project to develop high-speed filming techniques for nuclear tests, which of course had to be set off by an electric signal from the bomb activation mechanism, and this is the reason why they ended up in charge of the timing and firing side of the bomb . In his book Nuclear Hostages, O'Keefe ( head of E.G.G. in 1983 ) explains how he wired up the Nagasaki bomb's implosion system on Tinian Island, changing an incorrect cable connector with a soldering iron on the assembled bomb so it could be dropped on schedule. At the Nevada test site, the control signal to the bomb in cables was also used to set off high speed cameras and other instrumentation electronics, so E.G. & G. ended up expert in the experimental study of EMP damage by cross-talk between parallel cables and different adjacent circuits. It is clear that there was during the 1950s a problem in getting this secret EMP damage data away from E.G. & G. - who viewed it as a technical nuisance - to the people interested in the damaging effects of nuclear explosions.

7. Radar oscilloscopes showed the induced transient EMP effect as a “ball of yarn” and “bloom”. After the EMP damage effects to electronic piezo electric blast gauge chart recorders at the first ever nuclear test Trinity on 16 July 1945, and the EMP damage to the control console dials at Sandstone tests in 1948, the next serious EMP problems apparently occurred with the 1.2 kt Jangle-Sugar test of 1951, which was the first ever cable-controlled test in the Nevada Test Site (after a series of free air burst bombs dropped from aircraft, the detonation of which were controlled by timer/radar sensors instead of by wired cable control).

1. The radial electric field of the EMP induced electric currents of thousands of amps in bomb electrical cables at 800 m from ground zero, breaking down cable insulation, fusing multicore conductors together, and actually melting the protective lead sheathing surrounding “hardened” cables.

On 30 April 1961, B.J. Stralser’s report Electromagnetic effects from nuclear tests, Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier, Inc. (classified Secret – Restricted Data) was the first official American secret report produced summarising the physical damage due to EMP on the power distribution system, telephone system, and testing control equipment at the Nevada test site, due to small surface and near surface (tower) bursts:

‘[At the Sandstone-X Ray 37 kt nuclear test on April 15, 1948, from a 200 ft tower on Enjebi Island at Eniwetok Atoll] we had to watch the control panel [in the control room 30 km away] ... lights flashed crazily on and off and meters bent their needles against their stop posts from the force of the electromagnetic pulse travelling down the submerged cables with the speed of light... one of our engineers, halfway around the world in Boston... was able to detect [the radiated EMP or radio-flash] with a makeshift antenna and an oscilloscope, the world’s first remote detection measurement.’

‘It was necessary to place most of the [1945 Trinity nuclear test measurement] equipment in a position where it had to withstand the heat and shock wave from the bomb, or alternatively to send its data to a distant recording station before it was destroyed. We can understand the difficulty of transmitting signals during the explosion when we consider that the gamma rays from the reaction will ionise the air... Fermi has calculated that the ensuing removal of the natural electrical potential gradient in the atmosphere will be equivalent to a large bolt of lightning striking that vicinity [this is precisely what was actually photographed around the fireball of the Mike 10.4 Mt thermonuclear test in 1952, see top of this blog post for the photograph and literature references for nuclear lightning] ... All signal lines were completely shielded, in many cases doubly shielded. In spite of this many records were lost because of spurious pickup at the time of the explosion that paralysed the recording equipment.’

EMP ("radioflash") is also emit by conventional chemical explosives, due to the charge separation: exploding TNT ionizes some of the product molecules at a temperature of thousands of degrees C, thereby propelling some free electrons outwards faster than the heaver ions, which causes a charge separation, and thus an EMP emission, just like radio emission from electric charge moving in an antenna (in cases where there is asymmetry caused by the ground or other absorber on one side of the explosion). Chemical explosive EMP was first reported in 1954 inv173, p77. The peak electric field strength falls off by the reciprocal of the cube of distance near the detonation, but only inversely with distance far away. Extensive EMP measurements were reported for TNT explosions by Dr Victor A. J. van Lint, involume NS-29, 1982, pp. 1844-9. He showed that chemical explosion surface burst EMP is vertically-polarized and first peaks in the negative direction (i.e. due to free electrons moving upwards, or "conventional current" moving downwards) at 8 milliseconds after detonation. The average first peak electric field strength for 46 kg of TNT ranged from -389 v/m at 35 metres distance to -5.20 v/m at 140 metres.In chemical explosion, EMP creation is limited to the hot fireball region where air is ionized by the heat. But in a nuclear explosion, the Compton effect produces an EMP far more effectively, with gamma rays knocking electrons off air molecules in the forward direction, even well outside the hot fireball.test firing controller Dr Herbert Grier of E.G. & G at Operation PLUMBBOB in 1957 when EMP was well known (which is why - if you click on the photo for an up-close view of the Nevada nuclear test control console - you can see that it is actually very ruggedly constructed to deliberately survive EMP). During the count-down, the Nevada Test Site main power supply technicians were warned deliberately over loudspeakers just before detonation: 'Stand by to reset circuit breakers'. E.G. & G. were responsible for all American electronics at atmospheric tests in both the Pacific and Nevada. They set up the firing circuits for the bombs, laid the cables to the bomb, set up circuits linked to the firing circuit so that high-speed cameras would be turned on at the right time to film the fireball, did the count-down and 'pressed the button' (or rather, didn't press the stop button on the automatic sequence timer). For tower shots and surface bursts, EMP surges induced near the detonation of thousands of amperes were conducted in the cables back to the control point, ruining equipment and escaping by cable cross-talk (mutual inductance due to magnetic fields in the insulator between parallel unconnected cables!) into other circuits, such as the telephone system, which had to be switched over to diesel generator power at shot time to isolate it from damage. EMP fused cable conductors together, arched over porcelain insulators and lightning surger protectors, welded the contacts on relays together, permanently pegged meter dials over to full scale, and burned out other electronic components. E.G. & G. kept the EMP data secret and did not even tell the U.S. Department of Defense, which was merely measuring long-distance radiated EMP for weapons diagnostic purposes and for detecting foreign atmospheric nuclear tests. This is why close-in (source region) EMP cable pick-up and coupling damage was ignored until 30 April 1961, when B. J. Stralser of E.G. & G. wrote a Secret - Restricted Data report on all the EMP damage from the 50s tests, Electromagnetic effects from nuclear tests, which we will discuss in detail together with a Russian and British EMP effects reports from 1959, and French EMP effects reports from their first and fourth nuclear tests in the Sahara desert.‘The objective of Mike Shot was to test, by actual detonation, the theory of design for a thermonuclear reaction on a large scale, the results of which test could be used to design, test, and produce stockpile thermonuclear weapons... Quantitative measurements of the gross explosion-induced electromagnetic signal were made possible by first displaying portions of that signal on the faces of cathode-ray tubes. The results of these efforts were excellent... On Mike Shot the early electromagnetic signal was displayed in sufficient detail to allow a rough measurement of the time delay between primary and secondary fission reactions.’

Above: nuclear lightning observed in film of the 10 megatons H-bomb test, Ivy-Mike , Elugelab Island, Eniwetok Atoll, 1 November 1952 (click on photos for larger view). The nuclear lightning was visible clearly at times of 3-75 milliseconds after burst. (Images are taken from the excellent quality Atomic Energy Commission film, "Photography of Nuclear Detonations", embedded below .) The nearest lightning bolts (between the sea water around the island and the non-thunderstorm scud cloud) are both 925 metres from ground zero, and other lightning flashes at are 1,100, 1,280 and 1,380 metres from ground zero. The best estimate, by J. D. Colvin, et al., "An Empirical Study of the nuclear explosion-induced lightning seen on Ivy-Mike ", Journal of Geophysical Research, v92, 1987, p5696, is that each lightning bolt carried between 150 and 250 kA. The lightning bolts curve to follow constant radii around ground zero, corresponding to equal intensities of air conductivity and EMP Compton current.

Richard P. Feynman, ‘This Unscientific Age’, in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:

‘Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the [natural cosmic] radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious [than the smaller doses from nuclear explosions] ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'

“If a man reads or hears a criticism of anything in which he has an interest, watch ... if he shows concern with any question except ‘is it true?’ he thereby reveals that his own attitude is unscientific. Likewise if ... 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 ... The path of truth is paved with critical doubt, and lighted by the spirit of objective enquiry... the majority of people have resented what seems in retrospect to have been purely matter of fact ... nothing has aided the persistence of falsehood, and the evils resulting from it, more than the unwillingness of good people to admit the truth ... the tendency continues to be shocked by natural comment, and to hold certain things too ‘sacred’ to think about. ... 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.”

How to achieve peace through tested, proved and practical declassified countermeasures against the effects of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and conventional weapons. Credible deterrence through simple, effective protection against invasions and collateral damage. Discussions of the facts as opposed to inaccurate, misleading lies of the "disarm or be annihilated" political dogma variety. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda debunked by the hard facts. Walls not wars. Walls bring people together by stopping attacks by "divide and rule" style divisive terrorists, contrary to simplistic Vatican propaganda. "There has never been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented." - British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, House of Commons Debate on Foreign Affairs, Hansard, 23 November 1945, column 786 (unfortunately secret Cabinet committees called "democracy" for propaganda purposes have not been quite so successful in preventing war). Protection is needed against collateral civilian damage and contamination in conventional, chemical and nuclear attack, with credible low yield clean nuclear deterrence against conventional warfare which, in reality (not science fiction) costs far more lives. Anti scientific media, who promulgate and exploit terrorism for profit, censor (1) vital, effective civil defense knowledge and (2) effective, safe, low yield air burst clean weapons like the Mk54 and W79 which deter conventional warfare and escalation, allowing arms negotiations from a position of strength. This helped end the Cold War in the 1980s. Opposing civil defense and nuclear weapons that really deter conventional war, is complacent and dangerous. War and coercion dangers have not stemmed from those who openly attack mainstream mistakes, but from those who camouflage themselves as freedom fighters to ban such free criticism itself, by making the key facts seem taboo, without even a proper debate, let alone financing research into unfashionable alternatives. Research and education in non-mainstream alternatives is needed before an unprejudiced debate, to establish all the basic facts for a real debate. “Wisdom itself cannot flourish, nor even truth be determined, without the give and take of debate and criticism.” – Robert Oppenheimer (quotation from the H-bomb TV debate hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt, 12 February 1950). “Apologies for freedom? I can’t handle this! ... Deal from strength or get crushed every time ... Freedom demands liberty everywhere. I’m thinking, you see, it’s not so easy. But we have to stand up tall and answer freedom’s call!” – Freedom Kids

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

Civil defense countermeasures, to be taken seriously by the population, require the publication of solid facts with the scientific evidence to support those facts against political propaganda to the contrary. Secrecy over the effects of nuclear weapons tests does not hinder plutonium and missile production by rogue states, but it does hinder civil defense countermeasures, by permitting lying political propaganda to go unopposed (see linked post, here).

Terrorists successfully prey on the vulnerable. The political spreading of lies concerning threats and the alleged ‘impossibility’ of all countermeasures, terrorizing the population in order to ‘justify’ supposedly pro-peace disarmament policies in the 1920s-1930s, resulted in the secret rearmament of fascist states which were terrorizing the Jews and others, eventually leading to World War II.

Political exaggerations about nuclear weapons effects today:

(1) encourage terrorist states and other groups to secretly invest in such weapons to use either for political intimidation or for future use against countries which have no countermeasures, and

(2) falsely dismiss, in the eyes of the media and the public, cheap relatively effective countermeasures like civil defense and ABM.

Therefore, doom-mongering media lies make us vulnerable to the proliferation threat today in two ways, just as they led to both world wars:

(1) Exaggerations of offensive technology and a down-playing of simple countermeasures such as trenches, encouraged belligerent states to start World War I in the false belief that modern technology implied overwhelming firepower which would terminate the war quickly on the basis of offensive preparedness: if the facts about simple trench countermeasures against shelling and machine guns during the American Civil War had been properly understood, it would have been recognised by Germany that a long war based on munitions production and logistics would be necessary, and war would have been seen to be likely to lead to German defeat against countries with larger overseas allies and colonies that could supply munitions and the other resources required to win a long war.

(2) Exaggerations of aerial bombardment technology after World War I led to disarmament ‘supported by’ false claims that it was impossible to have any defense against a perceived threat of instant annihilation from thousands of aircraft carrying gas and incendiary bombs, encouraging fascists to secretly rearm in order to successfully take advantage of the fear and vulnerability caused by this lying political disarmament propaganda.

Contrived dismissal of civil defense by Marxist “Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group” bigots: (a) appeased war-mongering enemies, and (b) maximised war mortality rates. Idealism kills. Super effective, fully proof-tested, cheap civil defense makes nuclear deterrence credible to stop conventional war devastation by avoiding collateral damage, tit-for-tat retaliation and escalation.

Historically, it has been proved that having weapons is not enough to guarantee a reasonable measure of safety from terrorism and rogue states; countermeasures are also needed, both to make any deterrent credible and to negate or at least mitigate the effects of a terrorist attack. Some people who wear seatbelts die in car crashes; some people who are taken to hospital in ambulances, even in peace-time, die. Sometimes, lifebelts and lifeboats cannot save lives at sea. This lack of a 100% success rate in saving lives doesn't disprove the value of everyday precautions or of hospitals and medicine. Hospitals don't lull motorists into a false sense of security, causing them to drive faster and cause more accidents. Like-minded ‘arguments’ against ABM and civil defense are similarly vacuous.

‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile-defense construction in Europe will be removed.’

- President Obama, Prague Castle, Czech Republic, 4 April 2009.

Before 9/11, Caspar Weinberger was quizzed by skeptical critics on the BBC News program Talking Point, Friday, May 4, 2001: Caspar Weinberger quizzed on new US Star Wars ABM plans:

‘The [ABM] treaty was in 1972 ... The theory ... supporting the ABM treaty [which prohibits ABM, thus making nations vulnerable to terrorism] ... that it will prevent an arms race ... is perfect nonsense because we have had an arms race all the time we have had the ABM treaty, and we have seen the greatest increase in proliferation of nuclear weapons that we have ever had. ... So the ABM treaty preventing an arms race is total nonsense. ...

‘You have to understand that without any defences whatever you are very vulnerable. It is like saying we don't like chemical warfare - we don't like gas attacks - so we are going to give up and promise not to have any defences ever against them and that of course would mean then we are perfectly safe. ...

‘The Patriot was not a failure in the Gulf War - the Patriot was one of the things which defeated the Scud and in effect helped us win the Gulf War. One or two of the shots went astray but that is true of every weapon system that has ever been invented. ...

‘The fact that a missile defence system wouldn't necessarily block a suitcase bomb is certainly not an argument for not proceeding with a missile defence when a missile that hits can wipe out hundreds of thousands of lives in a second. ...

‘The curious thing about it is that missile defence is not an offensive weapon system - missile defence cannot kill anybody. Missile defence can help preserve and protect your people and our allies, and the idea that you are somehow endangering people by having a defence strikes me almost as absurd as saying you endanger people by having a gas mask in a gas attack. ...

‘President Bush said that we were going ahead with the defensive system but we would make sure that nobody felt we had offensive intentions because we would accompany it by a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal. It seems to me to be a rather clear statement that proceeding with the missile defence system would mean fewer arms of this kind.

‘You have had your arms race all the time that the ABM treaty was in effect and now you have an enormous accumulation and increase of nuclear weapons and that was your arms race promoted by the ABM treaty. Now if you abolish the ABM treaty you are not going to get another arms race - you have got the arms already there - and if you accompany the missile defence construction with the unilateral reduction of our own nuclear arsenal then it seems to me you are finally getting some kind of inducement to reduce these weapons.’

Before the ABM system is in place, and afterwards if ABM fails to be 100% effective in an attack, or is bypassed by terrorists using a bomb in a suitcase or in a ship, civil defense is required and can be effective at saving lives:

‘Paradoxically, the more damaging the effect, that is the farther out its lethality stretches, the more can be done about it, because in the last fall of its power it covers vast areas, where small mitigations will save very large numbers of people.’

- Peter Laurie, Beneath the City Streets: A Private Inquiry into the Nuclear Preoccupations of Government, Penguin, 1974.

‘The purpose of a book is to save people [the] time and effort of digging things out for themselves. ... we have tried to leave the reader with something tangible – what a certain number of calories, roentgens, etc., means in terms of an effect on the human being. ... we must think of the people we are writing for.’

– Dr Samuel Glasstone, DSc, letter dated 1 February 1957 to Colonel Dent L. Lay, Chief, Weapons Effects Division, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Washington, D.C., pages 2 and 4, concerning the preparation of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.

Glasstone and Dolan stated in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Table 12.17 on page 546, that the median distance in Hiroshima for survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the median distances for survival in modern city buildings and in the open differed by a factor of 11 for Hiroshima; the difference in areas was thus a factor of 112 or about 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings reduces the casualty rates and the risks of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless. This would reduce 120,000 casualties to 1,000 casualties.

From Dr Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1962/64 ed., page 631): ‘At distances between 0.3 and 0.4 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima the average survival rate, for at least 20 days after the nuclear explosion, was less than 20 percent. Yet in two reinforced concrete office buildings, at these distances, almost 90 percent of the nearly 800 occupants survived more than 20 days, although some died later of radiation injury. Furthermore, of approximately 3,000 school students who were in the open and unshielded within a mile of ground zero at Hiroshima, about 90 percent were dead or missing after the explosion. But of nearly 5,000 students in the same zone who were shielded in one way or another, only 26 percent were fatalities. ... survival in Hiroshima was possible in buildings at such distances that the overpressure in the open was 15 to 20 pounds per square inch. ... it is evident ... that the area over which protection could be effective in saving lives is roughly eight to ten times as great as that in which the chances of survival are small.’

Lord Mayhew, House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983: ‘... if there had been effective civil defence at Hiroshima probably thousands of lives would have been saved and much human suffering would have been avoided. There is no question about it. ...’

Since the 1977 update by Glasstone and Dolan, extensive new updates to EM-1 for a further revised edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons have not actually been published with unlimited public distribution, due to President Carter’s 1979 executive order which transferred responsibility for civil defense from the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Civil Preparedness Agency to the new agency (which is not an Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, and is not concerned with the analysis of nuclear weapons test effects data), the Federal Emergency Management Agency. However, the February 1997 U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Special Weapons Agency 0602715H RDT&E Budget Item Justification Sheet (R-2 Exhibit) states that a revision of Glasstone and Dolan’s unclassified Effects of Nuclear Weapons was budgeted for 1997-9:

“FY 1997 Plans: ... Provide text to update Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... Update the unclassified textbook entitled, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. ... Continue revision of Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... FY1999 Plans ... Disseminate updated The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.”

The new publications are either classified or unclassified with limited distribution restrictions (e.g., Bridgman’s Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects, which includes several chapters on nuclear weapons design to enable initial radiation outputs to be calculated precisely) which prevents up-to-date basic nuclear effects information to justify civil defense against the latest nuclear threats from being widely disseminated; the books are printed for use only by government agencies. The problem with this approach is that widespread public understanding of the best information for civil defense countermeasures is prevented.

‘The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later consumed by fire [caused by the blast overturning charcoal braziers used for breakfast in inflammable wooden houses filled with easily ignitable bamboo furnishings and paper screens] were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning after the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast. This situation is not unlike the one our computer-based fire spread model described for Detroit.’

- Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3: What the Planner Needs to Know About Fire Ignition and Spread, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panel 27.

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, US Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theatre, report 92, volume 2 (May 1947, secret):

Volume one, page 14:

“... the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only:

“... capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”

Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:

Page 24:

“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” [Contrast this to the obfuscation and vagueness in Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons!]

Page 88:

“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 unclassified USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims]

“... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”

‘It is true that the Soviets have tested nuclear weapons of a yield higher than that which we thought necessary, but the 100-megaton bomb of which they spoke two years ago does not and will not change the balance of strategic power. The United States has chosen, deliberately, to concentrate on more mobile and more efficient weapons, with lower but entirely sufficient yield ...’ - President John F. Kennedy in his television broadcast to the American public, 26 July 1963.

‘During World War II many large cities in England, Germany, and Japan were subjected to terrific attacks by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Yet, when proper steps had been taken for the protection of the civilian population and for the restoration of services after the bombing, there was little, if any, evidence of panic. It is the purpose of this book to state the facts concerning the atomic bomb, and to make an objective, scientific analysis of these facts. It is hoped that as a result, although it may not be feasible completely to allay fear, it will at least be possible to avoid panic.’

– Dr George Gamow (the big bang cosmologist), Dr Samuel Glasstone, DSc (Executive Editor of the book), and Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, Chapter 1, p. 1, Paragraph 1.3, U.S. Department of Defense, September 1950.

‘The consequences of a multiweapon nuclear attack would certainly be grave ... Nevertheless, recovery should be possible if plans exist and are carried out to restore social order and to mitigate the economic disruption.’

- Philip J. Dolan, editor of Nuclear Weapons Employment FM 101-31 (1963), Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1 (1972), and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Stanford Research Institute, 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, 1981.

‘Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been 1,000 times as powerful ... It could not have killed 1,000 times as many people, but at most the entire population of Hiroshima ... [regarding the hype about various nuclear "overkill" exaggerations] there is enough water in the oceans to drown everyone ten times.’

- Professor Brian Martin, PhD (physics), 'The global health effects of nuclear war', Current Affairs Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 7, December 1982, pp. 14-26.

In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.

‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’

- Dr Robert Rowland, Director of the Center for Human Radiobiology, Bone Sarcoma in Humans Induced by Radium: A Threshold Response?, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, European Society for Radiation Biology, Radioprotection colloquies, Vol. 32CI (1997), pp. 331-8.

Zbigniew Jaworowski, 'Radiation Risk and Ethics: Health Hazards, Prevention Costs, and Radiophobia', Physics Today, April 2000, pp. 89-90:

‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...

‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...

‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.

‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’

‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.

Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:

‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. …

‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...

‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.

‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’

Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed., 1977, pp. 611-3:

‘From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...

‘At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations.’

George Bernard Shaw cynically explains groupthink brainwashing bias:

‘We cannot help it because we are so constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against, but that this evidence was staring us in the face all the time.’

From the essay titled ‘What is Science?’ by Professor Richard P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-20:

‘... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.

‘We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields - radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’

Richard P. Feynman, ‘This Unscientific Age’, in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:

‘Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the [natural cosmic] radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious [than the smaller doses from nuclear explosions] ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'

Feynman is not making a point about low level radiation effects, but about the politics of ignoring the massive natural background radiation dose, while provoking hysteria over much smaller measured fallout pollution radiation doses. Why is the anti-nuclear lobby so concerned about banning nuclear energy - which is not possible even in principle since most of our nuclear radiation is from the sun and from supernova debris contaminating the Earth from the explosion that created the solar system circa 4,540 million years ago - when they could cause much bigger radiation dose reductions to the population by concentrating on the bigger radiation source, natural background radiation. It is possible to shield natural background radiation by the air, e.g. by moving the population of high altitude cities to lower altitudes where there is more air between the people and outer space, or banning the use of high-altitude jet aircraft. The anti-nuclear lobby, as Feynman stated back in the 1960s, didn't crusade to reduce the bigger dose from background radiation. Instead they chose to argue against the much smaller doses from fallout pollution. Feynman's argument is still today falsely interpreted as a political statement, when it is actually exposing pseudo-science and countering political propaganda. It is still ignored by the media. It has been pointed out by Senator Hickenlooper on page 1060 of the May-June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man:

‘I presume all of us would earnestly hope that we never had to test atomic weapons ... but by the same token I presume that we want to save thousands of lives in this country every year and we could just abolish the manufacture of [road accident causing] automobiles ...’

Dihydrogen monoxide is a potentially very dangerous chemical containing hydrogen and oxygen which has caused numerous severe burns by scalding and deaths by drowning, contributes to the greenhouse effect, accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals, and contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape: 'Dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.'

From the site for the petition against dihydrogen monoxide: ‘Please sign this petition and help stop This Invisible Killer. Get the government to do something now. ... Contamination Is Reaching Epidemic Proportions! Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property damage in the Midwest, and recently California.’

A recent example of the pseudoscientific radiation 'education' masquerading as science that Feynman (quoted above) objected to in the 1960s was published in 2009 in an article called 'The proportion of childhood leukaemia incidence in Great Britain that may be caused by natural background ionizing radiation' in Leukemia, vol. 23 (2009), pp. 770–776, which falsely asserts - in contradiction to the evidence that the no-threshold model is contrary to Hiroshima and Nagasaki data: 'Risk models based primarily on studies of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors imply that low-level exposure to ionizing radiation, including ubiquitous natural background radiation, also raises the risk of childhood leukaemia. Using two sets of recently published leukaemia risk models and estimates of natural background radiation red-bone-marrow doses received by children, about 20% of the cases of childhood leukaemia in Great Britain are predicted to be attributable to this source.' The authors of this pseudoscience which is the opposite of the facts are R. Wakeford (Dalton Nuclear Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK), G. M. Kendall (Childhood Cancer Research Group, Oxford, UK), and M. P. Little (Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College, London, UK). It is disgusting and sinful that the facts about childhood leukemia are being lied on so blatantly for non-scientific purposes, and it is to be hoped that these leukemia investigators will either correct their errors or alternatively be banned from using scientific literature to promote false dogma for deception until they mend the error of their ways and repent their sins in this matter.

Protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53, which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 is one of the proteins which continually repairs breaks in DNA, which easily breaks at body temperature: the DNA in each cell of the human body suffers at least two single strand breaks every second, and one double strand (i.e. complete double helix) DNA break occurs at least once every 2 hours (5% of radiation-induced DNA breaks are double strand breaks, while 0.007% of spontaneous DNA breaks at body temperature are double strand breaks)! Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose strand ends at once, which repair proteins like P53 then repair incorrectly, causing a mutation which can be proliferated somatically. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. But if low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk.

1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally.

2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.

3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn’t occur.

In this way of thinking, the ‘cause’ of cancer will be down to a failure of a DNA repairing enzyme like protein P53 to repair the damage.

Dr Jane Orient, 'Homeland Security for Physicians', Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, vol. 11, number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 75-9:

'In the 1960s, a group of activist physicians called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) undertook to "educate the medical profession and the world about the dangers of nuclear weapons," beginning with a series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. [Note that journal was publishing information for anti-civil defense propaganda back in 1949, e.g. the article in volume 241, pp. 647-53 of New England Journal of Medicine which falsely suggests that civil defense in nuclear war would be hopeless because a single burned patient in 1947 with 40% body area burns required 42 oxygen tanks, 36 pints of plasma, 40 pints of whole blood, 104 pints of fluids, 4,300 m of gauze, 3 nurses and 2 doctors. First, only unclothed persons in direct line of sight without shadowing can get 40% body area burns from thermal radiation, second, duck and cover offers protection in a nuclear attack warning, and G. V. LeRoy had already published, two years earlier, in J.A.M.A., volume 134, 1947, pp. 1143-8, that less than 5% of burns in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were caused by building and debris fires. In medicine it is always possible to expend vast resources on patients who are fatally injured. In a mass casualty situation, doctors should not give up just because they don't have unlimited resources; as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would need to do their best with what they have.] On its website, www.psr.org, the group boasts that it "led the campaign to end atmospheric nuclear testing." With this campaign, the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory of radiation carcinogenesis became entrenched. It enabled activists to calculate enormous numbers of potential casualties by taking a tiny risk and multiplying it by the population of the earth. As an enduring consequence, the perceived risks of radiation are far out of proportion to actual risks, causing tremendous damage to the American nuclear industry. ... Efforts to save lives were not only futile, but unethical: Any suggestion that nuclear war could be survivable increased its likelihood and was thus tantamount to warmongering, PSR spokesmen warned. ...

'For the mindset that engendered and enables this situation, which jeopardizes the existence of the United States as a nation as well as the lives of millions of its citizens, some American physicians and certain prestigious medical organizations bear a heavy responsibility.

'Ethical physicians should stand ready to help patients to the best of their ability, and not advocate sacrificing them in the name of a political agenda. Even very basic knowledge, especially combined with simple, inexpensive advance preparations, could save countless lives.'

Dr Theodore B. Taylor, Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Selected Effects of a General War, DASIAC Special Report 95, July 1969, vol. 2, DASA-2019-2, AD0696959, page 298 (also linked here):

'I must just say that as far as I'm concerned I have had some doubts about whether we should have had a civil defense program in the past. I have no doubt whatsoever now, for this reason, that I've seen ways in which the deterrent forces can fail to hold things off, so that no matter what our national leaders do, criminal organizations, what have you, groups of people over which we have no control whatsoever, can threaten other groups of people.'

This point of Taylor is the key fact on the morality. Suppose we disarm and abandon nuclear power. That won't stop fallout from a war, terrorists, or a foreign reactor blast from coming. Civil defence knowledge is needed. Even when America has ABM, it will be vulnerable to wind carried fallout. No quantity of pacifist hot air will protect people against radiation.

Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp. 310-57:

‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong ... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability. ... the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’

Disarmament after World War I caused the following problem which led to World War II (reported by Winston S. Churchill in the London Daily Express newspaper of November 1, 1934):

‘Germany is arming secretly, illegally and rapidly. A reign of terror exists in Germany to keep secret the feverish and terrible preparations they are making.’

British Prime Minister Thatcher's address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, where she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people had been killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts:

‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’

J. D. Culshaw, the then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his article in the Scientific Advisory Branch journal Fission Fragments, September 1972 (issue No. 19), classified 'Restricted':

'Apart from those who don't want to know or can't be bothered, there seem to be three major schools of thought about the nature of a possible Third World War ...

* 'The first group think of something like World War II but a little worse ...

* '... the second of World War II but very much worse ...

* 'and the third group think in terms of a catastrophe ...

'When the Armageddon concept is in favour, the suggestion that such problems exist leads to "way out" research on these phenomena, and it is sufficient to mention a new catastrophic threat [e.g., 10 years later this was done by Sagan with "nuclear winter" hype, which turned out to be fake because modern concrete cities can't produce firestorms like 1940s wooden-built areas of Hamburg, Dresden and Hiroshima] to stimulate research into the possibilities of it arising. The underlying appeal of this concept is that if one could show that the execution of all out nuclear, biological or chemical warfare would precipitate the end of the world, no one but a mad man would be prepared to initiate such a war. [However, as history proves, plenty of mad men end up gaining power and leading countries into wars.]'

J. K. S. Clayton, then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his introduction, entitled The Challenge - Why Home Defence?, to the 1977 Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch Training Manual for Scientific Advisers:

'Since 1945 we have had nine wars - in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, between China and India, China and Russia, India and Pakistan and between the Arabs and Israelis on three occasions. We have had confrontations between East and West over Berlin, Formosa and Cuba. There have been civil wars or rebellions in no less than eleven countries and invasions or threatened invasions of another five. Whilst it is not suggested that all these incidents could have resulted in major wars, they do indicate the aptitude of mankind to resort to a forceful solution of its problems, sometimes with success. ...'

It is estimated that Mongol invaders exterminated 35 million Chinese between 1311-40, without modern weapons. Communist Chinese killed 26.3 million dissenters between 1949 and May 1965, according to detailed data compiled by the Russians on 7 April 1969. The Soviet communist dictatorship killed 40 million dissenters, mainly owners of small farms, between 1917-59. Conventional (non-nuclear) air raids on Japan killed 600,000 during World War II. The single incendiary air raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 killed 140,000 people (more than the total for nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) at much less than the $2 billion expense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Non-nuclear air raids on Germany during World War II killed 593,000 civilians. The argument that the enemy will continue stocking megaton fallout weapons if we go to cleaner weapons is irrelevant for deterrence, since we're not planning to start war, just to credibly deter invasions. You should not try to lower your standards of warfare to those of your enemy to appease groupthink taboos, or you will end up like Britain's leaders in the 1930s, trying to collaborate with fascists for popular applause.

House of Lords debate Nuclear Weapons: Destructive Power, published in Hansard, 14 June 1988:

Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: ‘My Lords, if we are going into the question of lethality of weapons and seek thereby to isolate the nuclear as distinct from the so-called conventional range, is there not a danger that the public may think that Vimy, Passchendaele and Dresden were all right—sort of tea parties—and that nuclear war is something which in itself is unacceptable?’

Lord Trefgarne: ‘My Lords, the policy of making Europe, or the rest of the world, safe for conventional war is not one that I support.’

House of Commons debate Civil Defence published in Hansard, 26 October 1983:

Mr. Bill Walker (Tayside, North): ‘I remind the House that more people died at Stalingrad than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yet people talk about fighting a conventional war in Europe as if it were acceptable. One rarely sees demonstrations by the so-called peace movement against a conventional war in Europe, but it could be nothing but ghastly and horrendous. The casualties would certainly exceed those at Stalingrad, and that cannot be acceptable to anyone who wants peace’

On 29 October 1982, Thatcher stated of the Berlin Wall: ‘In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles ... one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.’

On 22 November 1990, she said: ‘Today, we have a Europe ... where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end. These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’

'The case for civil defence stands regardless of whether a nuclear deterrent is necessary or not. ... Even if the U.K. were not itself at war, we would be as powerless to prevent fallout from a nuclear explosion crossing the sea as was King Canute to stop the tide.' - U.K. Home Office leaflet, Civil Defence, 1982.

‘... peace cannot be guaranteed absolutely. Nobody can be certain, no matter what policies this or any other Government were to adopt, that the United Kingdom would never again be attacked. Also we cannot tell what form such an attack might take. Current strategic thinking suggests that if war were to break out it would start with a period of conventional hostilities of uncertain duration which might or might not escalate to nuclear conflict. ... while nuclear weapons exist there must always be a chance, however small, that they will be used against us [like gas bombs in World War II]. ... as a consequence of war between other nations in which we were not involved fall out from nuclear explosions could fall on a neutral Britain. ... conventional war is not the soft option that is sometimes suggested. It is also too easily forgotten that in World War II some 50 million people died and that conventional weapons have gone on killing people ever since 1945 without respite.’ - - The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Gray of Contin), House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983.

‘All of us are living in the light and warmth of a huge hydrogen bomb, 860,000 miles across and 93 million miles away, which is in a state of continuous explosion.’ - Dr Isaac Asimov.

‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’ – Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.

‘But compared with a supernova a hydrogen bomb is the merest trifle. For a supernova is equal in violence to about a million million million million hydrogen bombs all going off at the same time.’ – Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), The Nature of the Universe, Pelican Books, London, 1963, p. 75.

‘In fact, physicists find plenty of interesting and novel physics in the environment of a nuclear explosion. Some of the physical phenomena are valuable objects of research, and promise to provide further understanding of nature.’ – Dr Harold L. Brode, The RAND Corporation, ‘Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects,’ Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Volume 18, 1968, pp. 153-202.

‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a [4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, type Ia] supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’ – Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001), University of Arkansas, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ pages 83-96 of Radionuclides in the Environment: A Symposium Sponsored By the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology At the 155th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, San Francisco, California, April 1-3, 1968, edited by Symposium Chairman Dr Edward C. Freiling (1922-2000) of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.

Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001) in 1956 correctly predicted the existence of water-moderated natural nuclear reactors in flooded uranium ore seams, which were discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin in three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, where sixteen sites operated as natural nuclear reactors with self-sustaining nuclear fission 2,000 million years ago, each lasting several hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW. The radioactive waste they generated remained in situ for a period of 2,000,000,000 years without escaping. They were discovered during investigations into why the U-235 content of the uranium in the ore was only 0.7171% instead of the normal 0.7202%. Some of the ore, in the middle of the natural reactors, had a U-235 isotopic abundance of just 0.440%. Kuroda's brilliant paper is entitled, 'On the Nuclear Physical Stability of the Uranium Minerals', published in the Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 25 (1956), pp. 781–782 and 1295–1296.

A type Ia supernova explosion, always yielding 4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, results from the critical mass effect of the collapse of a white dwarf as soon as its mass exceeds 1.4 solar masses due to matter falling in from a companion star. The degenerate electron gas in the white dwarf is then no longer able to support the pressure from the weight of gas, which collapses, thereby releasing enough gravitational potential energy as heat and pressure to cause the fusion of carbon and oxygen into heavy elements, creating massive amounts of radioactive nuclides, particularly intensely radioactive nickel-56, but half of all other nuclides (including uranium and heavier) are also produced by the 'R' (rapid) process of successive neutron captures by fusion products in supernovae explosions. Type Ia supernovae occur typically every 400 years in the Milky Way galaxy. On 4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers observed in the sky (without optical instruments) the bright supernova in the constellation Taurus which today is still visible as the Crab Nebula through telescopes. The Crab Nebula debris has a diameter now of 7 light years and is still expanding at 800 miles/second. The supernova debris shock wave triggers star formation when it encounters hydrogen gas in space by compressing it and seeding it with debris; bright stars are observed in the Orion Halo, the 300 light year diameter remains of a supernova. It is estimated that when the solar system was forming 4,540 million years ago, a supernova occurred around 100 light years away, and the heavy radioactive debris shock wave expanded at 1,000 miles/second. Most of the heavy elements including iron, silicon and calcium in the Earth and people are the stable end products of originally radioactive decay chains from the space burst fallout of a 7 x 1026 megatons thermonuclear explosion, created by fusion and successive neutron captures after the implosion of a white dwarf; a supernova explosion.

How would a 1055 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion differ from the big bang? Ignorant answers biased in favour of curved spacetime (ignoring quantum gravity!) abound, such as claims that explosions can’t take place in ‘outer space’ (disagreeing with the facts from nuclear space bursts by Russia and America in 1962, not to mention natural supernova explosions in space!) and that explosions produce sound waves in air by definition! There are indeed major differences in the nuclear reactions between the big bang and a nuclear bomb. But it is helpful to notice the solid physical fact that implosion systems suggest the mechanism of gravitation: in implosion, TNT is well-known to produce an inward force on a bomb core, but Newton's 3rd law says there is an equal and opposite reaction force outward. In fact, you can’t have a radially outward force without an inward reaction force! It’s the rocket principle. The rocket accelerates (with force F = ma) forward by virtue of the recoil from accelerating the exhaust gas (with force F = -ma) in the opposite direction! Nothing massive accelerates without an equal and opposite reaction force. Applying this fact to the measured 6 x 10-10 ms-2 ~ Hc cosmological acceleration of matter radially outward from observers in the universe which was predicted accurately in 1996 and later observationally discovered in 1999 (by Perlmutter, et al.), we find an outward force F = ma and inward reaction force by the 3rd law. The inward force allows quantitative predictions, and is mediated by gravitons, predicting gravitation in a checkable way (unlike string theory, which is just a landscape of 10500 different perturbative theories and so can’t make any falsifiable predictions about gravity). So it seems as if nuclear explosions do indeed provide helpful analogies to natural features of the world, and the mainstream lambda-CDM model of cosmology - with its force-fitted unobserved ad hoc speculative ‘dark energy’ - ignores and sweeps under the rug major quantum gravity effects which increase the physical understanding of particle physics, particularly force unification and the relation of gravitation to the existing electroweak SU(2) x U(1) section of the Standard Model of fundamental forces.

Richard Lieu, Physics Department, University of Alabama, ‘Lambda-CDM cosmology: how much suppression of credible evidence, and does the model really lead its competitors, using all evidence?’, http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.2462.

Even Einstein grasped the possibility that general relativity's lambda-CDM model is at best just a classical approximation to quantum field theory, at the end of his life when he wrote to Besso in 1954:

‘I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [classical differential equation] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [non-quantum] gravitation theory included ...’

‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Professor Richard P. Feynman (quoted by Professor Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 307).

‘The expression of dissenting views may not seem like much of a threat to a powerful organization, yet sometimes it triggers an amazingly hostile response. The reason is that a single dissenter can puncture an illusion of unanimity. ... Among those suppressed have been the engineers who tried to point out problems with the Challenger space shuttle that caused it to blow up. More fundamentally, suppression is a denial of the open dialogue and debate that are the foundation of a free society. Even worse than the silencing of dissidents is the chilling effect such practices have on others. For every individual who speaks out, numerous others decide to play it safe and keep quiet. More serious than external censorship is the problem of self-censorship.’

— Professor Brian Martin, University of Wollongong, 'Stamping Out Dissent', Newsweek, 26 April 1993, pp. 49-50

In 1896, Sir James Mackenzie-Davidson asked Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895: ‘What did you think?’ Röntgen replied: ‘I did not think, I investigated.’ The reason? Cathode ray expert J. J. Thomson in 1894 saw glass fluorescence far from a tube, but due to prejudice (expert opinion) he avoided investigating that X-ray evidence! ‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Richard Feynman, in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307.

Mathematical symbols in this blog: your computer’s browser needs access to standard character symbol sets to display Greek symbols for mathematical physics. If you don’t have the symbol character sets installed, the density symbol ' r ' (Rho) will appear as 'r' and the ' p ' (Pi) symbol will as 'p', causing confusion with the use of 'r' for radius and 'p' for momentum in formulae. This problem exists with Mozilla Firefox 3, but not with Microsoft Explorer which displays Greek symbols.

About Me Name: nige Currently designing secure active server page (ASP) front ends for client SQL databases. In 1982 I began programming in basic, and at college learned Fortran while a physics undergraduate a decade later. Afterwards, I switched from mainstream physics and mathematical education to part-time programming student, while working in a series of jobs including four years in credit control. www.quantumfieldtheory.org http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/capabilities-of-nuclear-weapons.html/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=273#comment-5322. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=353&cpage=1#comment-8728. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=215#comment-4082. View my complete profile

From 1945-62, America tested 216 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 154 megatons, with a mean yield of 713 kilotons

From 1949-62, Russia tested 214 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 281 megatons, with a mean yield of 1.31 megatons

From 1952-8, Britain tested 21 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 10.8 megatons, with a mean yield of 514 kilotons

From 1960-74, France tested 46 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 11.4 megatons, with a mean yield of 248 kilotons

From 1964-80, China tested 23 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 21.5 megatons, with a mean yield of 935 kilotons

In summary, from 1945-80, America, Russia, Britain, France and China tested 520 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 478.7 megatons, with a mean yield of 921 kilotons

Mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. Total yield: 1,646 Mt.

Mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.

For diffraction damage where damage areas scale as the two-thirds power of explosive yield, this stockpile's area damage potential can be compared to the 20,000,000 conventional bombs of 100 kg size (2 megatons of TNT equivalent total energy) dropped on Germany during World War II: (Total nuclear bomb blast diffraction damaged ground area)/(Total conventional blast diffraction damaged ground area to Germany during World War II) = [4,552*(0.257 Mt)2/3]/[20,000,000*(0.0000001 Mt)2/3] = 1,840/431 = 4.3. Thus, although the entire U.S. stockpile has a TNT energy equivalent to 586 times that of the 2 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in World War II, it is only capable of causing 4.3 times as much diffraction type damage area, because any given amount of explosive energy is far more efficient when distributed over many small explosions than in a single large e