The problem of conveying nuclear effects facts to the public against anti-civil defense propaganda; reviewing the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan 0comments
guest IP:124.161.31.* published in 2010-04-06 22:58:11
Above: the British Government's 1957 civil defence poster on The Hydrogen Bomb (U.K. National Archives reference INF 13/281) grossly exaggerates the effects of nuclear weapons due to errors in Dr ...
Above: the British Government's 1957 civil defence poster on The Hydrogen Bomb (U.K. National Archives reference INF 13/281) grossly exaggerates the effects of nuclear weapons due to errors in Dr Glasstone's June 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons on thermal radiation transmission blast and cratering. Thermal transmission was wrongly assumed to be about 50% for all distances beyond 10 miles. The crater size was quoted as 1 mile diameter for the 10 megaton Mike test on the water wave innundated saturated porous coral reef around Elugelab Island of Eniwetok Atoll in 1952; the correct crater diameter for a 10 megaton surface burst on dry soil is just 0.11 miles as finally discovered from gravitational potential energy considerations in 1991.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Height of burst blast curves: American and British analyses
3. Ground shock cratering water waves
4. Thermal phenomenology
5. Initial nuclear radiation
6. Fallout
7. Radio and radar temporary attenuation by ionization
8. Electronic and electrical equipment damage by EMP
9. Biological effects
1. Introduction
Each edition of the U.S. Department of Defense's book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons has coincided with significant public concern over a nuclear weapons threat. The first version dated 1950 was a response to the development of nuclear weapons by Russia which tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949 (the preparation for the 1950 edition actually began before the Russian test when it was clear that Russia would have the bomb within a few years). The 1957 edition based mainly on the Nevada tests up to and including Operation Teapot in 1955 and the Pacific tests up to and including Operation Redwing in 1956 was a response to the bigger threat from the megaton range hydrogen bombs and their fallout and the increasing test data. The 1962/4 edition responded was a completely rewritten expanded version written in response to the new data from the many 1957 Nevada tests of Operation Plumbbob and the 1958 Pacific tests of Operation Hardtack and to support President Kennedy's civil defense initiative has the best final chapter on the principles of civil defense silencing most of the "protection is futile"-appeasers whose aim is always to exaggerate the effects to such a lying extent that civil defense disappears as an option and the only option to avoid the risk of "total annihilation" is the surrender to secret terrorist regimes (as occurred in the 1930s when Germany secretly rearmed and was able to intimidate a largely disarmed world).
The 1977 edition was published at a time when the Soviet strategic nuclear threat was finally outpacing the American stockpile and is technically the most sophisticated. It is really a military textbook. It is not a compendium of all of the best nuclear test data let alone of the scientific literature although it does have many excellent chapter bibliographies listing very important research reports and books on each topic. Instead it is a state-of-the-art summary of the results that have come out of generally secret research as we will show later on. The result is a reliance on authority to a certain extent although in some cases - the best example being the chapter on "Radio and Radar Effects" - most of the basic calculations are clearly set out in detail. Because detailed comparisons between theory and nuclear test data are generally excluded from the book due to secrecy in 1977 it suffers from an overly "theoretical" feel. The secrecy of nuclear test effects data and even the full U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki misleads the public (particularly many academic scientists) into believing falsely that such data simply does not exist and was never measured accurately. One problem with
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