Denys writes:

> Whilst being present at the site of a detonating thermo-nuclear weapon will
>  ruin your whole day and weekend besides, Wirt was alluding to the theory
the
>  radiation fallout would kill every single human being on the planet, twice
>  over.  That is yet another exaggeration from our good friend Wirt who seems
>  full of them these days.
>
>  I remember those days living in the nuclear shadow.  Some of you will say,
>  but Denys, you lived in Canada at that time.  True enough. And in North
>  America, we keep thinking of the long distances between cities in Canada
and
>  the US, however, Montreal is 60 miles from Plattsburgh AFB (Closed in
1995),
>  as the crow flies.  Plattsburgh was home of SAC's 380th Bomb Wing equipped
>  with B-52s and later FB-111As.  About 60 miles due north of Montreal was
the
>  anti-aircraft missile complex at La Macaza, Quebec and the home of the RCAF
>  447 SAM Squadron equipped with nuclear-tipped Boeing BOMARC missiles.  This
>  complex was one of two built as part of NORAD (the other was in North Bay,
>  Ontario, home to the 446 SAM squadron). The Boeing BOMARC (BOeing Michigan
>  Air Research) missile was powered by two Marquardt ramjet engines, and was
>  designed to fly at Mach 2.8 and intercept packs of incoming (presumably
>  Soviet) bombers and detonate its nuclear warhead, taking the pack of
bombers
>  with it.  Plattsburgh AFB and CFB La Macaza, two magnets for Soviet ICBMs
>  were about 130 miles apart, with Montreal right in the middle.  With the
>  1960 CEP of Soviet ICBMs being what it was, you figure out the chances of
>  one or more ICBM impacting the city.  The best way to survive a nuclear
>  attack is to be somewhere else.  This would not have worked well in
>  Montreal.
>
>  At any rate, Neville Shutte notwithstanding, the danger from nuclear
fallout
>  is highly exaggerated.  Yes, nuclear weapons can kill a huge number of
>  people and cause tremendous damage however outside the immediate blast
area,
>  the supposed lethal effects of the weapon come from radiation fallout and
>  perhaps nuclear winter.  But the World Wide Web is a phenomenal invention
>  allowing someone with google.com and a modicum of intelligence to read
>  opinions and articles, which are not censored by the traditional news
media.
>  I found this interesting paper, whilst searching for another one that I
know
>  about.
>
>  http://cnts.wpi.edu/RSH/Docs/Presentations/RadnTruth.rtf

I guess that I have reached the point of no longer being polite. Denys'
posting is simply unadulterated bullshit. His saying that he lived in the
shadow of the nuclear threat qualifies him for nothing, other than an
uninformed opinion.

I've mentioned before that I worked as a nuclear weapons physicist for two
years at the Nuclear Weapons Effects Laboratory, White Sands Missile Range; I
quit the day after my number came up 360 out of 366 in the 1970 draft
lottery. It was the most disquieting, disgusting job you could ever imagine,
if you took it seriously.

It was my specific job, as a member of the Test & Analysis Group, to analyze
nuclear weapons effects on Army equipment. I've also referenced these few
pictures that appear here before:

     http://aics-research.com/fadac.html

The computer in the pictures is FADAC (Field Artillery Digital Automatic
Computer). It was the first piece of Army equipment to fail due to
electromagnetic pulse (EMP), thus for a while, these tests were extensively
examined. These are the only pictures that I have of those two years of my
nuclear weapons research simply because cameras weren't allowed anywhere
else. These pictures were taken in a field at Camp A.P. Hill, VA, near a
one-tenth threat EMP simulator run by Ft. Belvoir, which was requested that I
not photograph.

But the whole reason for the tests were to insure that the fire direction
computer would survive the effects of a nearby nuclear weapons blast that
would allow the operator to survive for two hours and keep punching the
buttons. And as I mentioned before,  a highly fictionalized kids movie was
later made out of these tests, "Project X", starring Matthew Broderick.

Although it was not my job to analyze human physiological responses, I worked
in close concert with those people whose job it was and we shared one
another's data. One of the things that people must get out of their minds are
the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. These were tiny weapons, estimated at
somewhere between 8 to 23 kilotons equivalent. By 1970, we had 25,000 to
30,000 launchable nuclear weapons pointed at each other, with an average
throw weight of 750 kilotons each.

I worked during the height of the ramp-up for the Strategic Defense
Initiative ("Star Wars"), and I was totally convinced that SDI was a process
that was going to get us all killed. Not only was it a fool's errand (at its
very best, it was going to leak like a sieve), and at its worst, it was going
to embolden the yahoos from Alabama and Georgia in the US Congress and the
Soviet Duma to do something truly stupid.

Because of my prior work, I was offered the Directorship of an SDI lab at Los
Alamos in the early 1980's, at a very high salary, but I could never imagine
doing this kind of work again and refused the job, although I was tempted
enough to interview for it.

While the arguments raged about world-wide lethality due to a full-throw
exchange, there was more than sufficient evidence to suggest that all-out
nuclear war would kill every terrestrial vertebrate. I held that opinion
then. I hold it now. But we truly don't know. We've never performed the
experiment.

A good portion of the work that we did, although it was not my direct
responsibility, was to imagine how a limited nuclear war could be conducted.
Full-throw was unimaginable. If it didn't kill every human on the planet, it
would be at the very least civilization-destroying. Thus how could a limited
nuclear war be conducted, particularly in Europe, without it immediately
escalating into full-throw?

My favorite scenario 30 years ago remains my favorite scenario now: Cargo
containers. They are the safest, technologically easiest, most untrackable
weapons delivery platform possible. This weekend, the NY Times ran a rather
long article in which the authorities they interviewed come to the same
conclusion. The effects of this kind of war, while not posing the lethality
to vertebrate life that the 1970's full-throw scenario did, would essentially
kill the United States in a matter of hours.

Weapons transshipped into the US in containers and stored in all of the major
port cities could be denotated on the same minute, on the same day, and
render the US completely helpless. Instantaneously, the US would lose its
financial centers, its centers of mass communications, it political centers,
it centers of industry, and yet kill only perhaps 10% of the population.
Nonetheless, the political class would instantly be relegated to midwestern
state governors and small city mayors. Everyone else would be dead. Worse,
transportation would be completely disrupted and no American city has more
than three days worth of food on hand.

Imagine the confusion of September 11th multiplied a million times over.

I've enclosed the NY Times Magazine article below (in two pieces). It's long,
but it's worth reading.

Wirt Atmar

=======================================

Nuclear Nightmares
By BILL KELLER


Not If But When Everybody who spends much time thinking about nuclear
terrorism can give you a scenario, something diabolical and, theoretically,
doable. Michael A. Levi, a researcher at the Federation of American
Scientists, imagines a homemade nuclear explosive device detonated inside a
truck passing through one of the tunnels into Manhattan. The blast would
crater portions of the New York skyline, barbecue thousands of people
instantly, condemn thousands more to a horrible death from radiation sickness
and -- by virtue of being underground -- would vaporize many tons of concrete
and dirt and river water into an enduring cloud of lethal fallout. Vladimir
Shikalov, a Russian nuclear physicist who helped clean up after the 1986
Chernobyl accident, envisioned for me an attack involving highly radioactive
cesium-137 loaded into some kind of homemade spraying device, and a target
that sounded particularly unsettling when proposed across a Moscow kitchen
table -- Disneyland. In this case, the human toll would be much less ghastly,
but the panic that would result from contaminating the Magic Kingdom with a
modest amount of cesium -- Shikalov held up his teacup to illustrate how much
-- would probably shut the place down for good and constitute a staggering
strike at Americans' sense of innocence. Shikalov, a nuclear enthusiast who
thinks most people are ridiculously squeamish about radiation, added that
personally he would still be happy to visit Disneyland after the terrorists
struck, although he would pack his own food and drink and destroy his
clothing afterward.

Another Russian, Dmitry Borisov, a former official of his country's atomic
energy ministry, conjured a suicidal pilot. (Suicidal pilots, for obvious
reasons, figure frequently in these fantasies.) In Borisov's scenario, the
hijacker dive-bombs an Aeroflot jetliner into the Kurchatov Institute, an
atomic research center in a gentrifying neighborhood of Moscow, which I had
just visited the day before our conversation. The facility contains 26
nuclear reactors of various sizes and a huge accumulation of radioactive
material. The effect would probably be measured more in property values than
in body bags, but some people say the same about Chernobyl.

Maybe it is a way to tame a fearsome subject by Hollywoodizing it, or maybe
it is a way to drive home the dreadful stakes in the arid-sounding business
of nonproliferation, but in several weeks of talking to specialists here and
in Russia about the threats an amateur evildoer might pose to the homeland, I
found an unnerving abundance of such morbid creativity. I heard a physicist
wonder whether a suicide bomber with a pacemaker would constitute an
effective radiation weapon. (I'm a little ashamed to say I checked that one,
and the answer is no, since pacemakers powered by plutonium have not been
implanted for the past 20 years.) I have had people theorize about whether
hijackers who took over a nuclear research laboratory could improvise an
actual nuclear explosion on the spot. (Expert opinions differ, but it's very
unlikely.) I've been instructed how to disperse plutonium into the
ventilation system of an office building.

The realistic threats settle into two broad categories. The less likely but
far more devastating is an actual nuclear explosion, a great hole blown in
the heart of New York or Washington, followed by a toxic fog of radiation.
This could be produced by a black-market nuclear warhead procured from an
existing arsenal. Russia is the favorite hypothetical source, although
Pakistan, which has a program built on shady middlemen and covert operations,
should not be overlooked. Or the explosive could be a homemade device, lower
in yield than a factory nuke but still creating great carnage.

The second category is a radiological attack, contaminating a public place
with radioactive material by packing it with conventional explosives in a
''dirty bomb'' by dispersing it into the air or water or by sabotaging a
nuclear facility. By comparison with the task of creating nuclear fission,
some of these schemes would be almost childishly simple, although the
consequences would be less horrifying: a panicky evacuation, a gradual
increase in cancer rates, a staggeringly expensive cleanup, possibly the need
to demolish whole neighborhoods. Al Qaeda has claimed to have access to dirty
bombs, which is unverified but entirely plausible, given that the makings are
easily gettable.

Nothing is really new about these perils. The means to inflict nuclear harm
on America have been available to rogues for a long time. Serious studies of
the threat of nuclear terror date back to the 1970's. American programs to
keep Russian nuclear ingredients from falling into murderous hands -- one of
the subjects high on the agenda in President Bush's meetings in Moscow this
weekend -- were hatched soon after the Soviet Union disintegrated a decade
ago. When terrorists get around to trying their first nuclear assault, as you
can be sure they will, there will be plenty of people entitled to say I told
you so.

All Sept. 11 did was turn a theoretical possibility into a felt danger. All
it did was supply a credible cast of characters who hate us so much they
would thrill to the prospect of actually doing it -- and, most important in
rethinking the probabilities, would be happy to die in the effort. All it did
was give our nightmares legs.

And of the many nightmares animated by the attacks, this is the one with
pride of place in our experience and literature -- and, we know from his own
lips, in Osama bin Laden's aspirations. In February, Tom Ridge, the Bush
administration's homeland security chief, visited The Times for a
conversation, and at the end someone asked, given all the things he had to
worry about -- hijacked airliners, anthrax in the mail, smallpox, germs in
crop-dusters -- what did he worry about most? He cupped his hands prayerfully
and pressed his fingertips to his lips. ''Nuclear,'' he said simply.

My assignment here was to stare at that fear and inventory the possibilities.
How afraid should we be, and what of, exactly? I'll tell you at the outset,
this was not one of those exercises in which weighing the fears and assigning
them probabilities laid them to rest. I'm not evacuating Manhattan, but
neither am I sleeping quite as soundly. As I was writing this early one
Saturday in April, the floor began to rumble and my desk lamp wobbled
precariously. Although I grew up on the San Andreas Fault, the fact that New
York was experiencing an earthquake was only my second thought.

The best reason for thinking it won't happen is that it hasn't happened yet,
and that is terrible logic. The problem is not so much that we are not doing
enough to prevent a terrorist from turning our atomic knowledge against us
(although we are not). The problem is that there may be no such thing as
''enough.''

25,000 Warheads, and It Only Takes One My few actual encounters with the
Russian nuclear arsenal are all associated with Thomas Cochran. Cochran, a
physicist with a Tennessee lilt and a sense of showmanship, is the director
of nuclear issues for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which promotes
environmental protection and arms control. In 1989, when glasnost was in
flower, Cochran persuaded the Soviet Union to open some of its most secret
nuclear venues to a roadshow of American scientists and congressmen and
invited along a couple of reporters. We visited a Soviet missile cruiser
bobbing in the Black Sea and drank vodka with physicists and engineers in the
secret city where the Soviets first produced plutonium for weapons.

Not long ago Cochran took me cruising through the Russian nuclear stockpile
again, this time digitally. The days of glasnost theatrics are past, and this
is now the only way an outsider can get close to the places where Russians
store and deploy their nuclear weapons. On his office computer in Washington,
Cochran has installed a detailed United States military map of Russia and
superimposed upon it high-resolution satellite photographs. We spent part of
a morning mouse-clicking from missile-launch site to submarine base, zooming
in like voyeurs and contemplating the possibility that a terrorist could
figure out how to steal a nuclear warhead from one of these places.

''Here are the bunkers,'' Cochran said, enlarging an area the size of a
football stadium holding a half-dozen elongated igloos. We were hovering over
a site called Zhukovka, in western Russia. We were pleased to see it did not
look ripe for a hijacking.

''You see the bunkers are fenced, and then the whole thing is fenced again,''
Cochran said. ''Just outside you can see barracks and a rifle range for the
guards. These would be troops of the 12th Main Directorate. Somebody's not
going to walk off the street and get a Russian weapon out of this particular
storage area.''

In the popular culture, nuclear terror begins with the theft of a nuclear
weapon. Why build one when so many are lying around for the taking? And
stealing tends to make better drama than engineering. Thus the stolen nuke
has been a staple in the literature at least since 1961, when Ian Fleming
published ''Thunderball,'' in which the malevolent Spectre (the Special
Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, a
strictly mercenary and more technologically sophisticated precursor to al
Qaeda) pilfers a pair of atom bombs from a crashed NATO aircraft. In the
movie version of Tom Clancy's thriller ''The Sum of All Fears,'' due in
theaters this week, neo-Nazis get their hands on a mislaid Israeli nuke, and
viewers will get to see Baltimore blasted to oblivion.

(cont'd)

=======================================

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