Conspiracy!
It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction.
(Sherlock Holmes)
We’ve gone through some intense material up to this point. Let’s take a philosophy break now. There seems to be a culture clash between so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ on one side of the divide and defenders of rational orthodoxy on the other. Conspiracy theorists propose and defend unconventional interpretations of events and motives. Such analyses (including this book) are viewed by defenders of orthodox thought as absolute drooling idiocy.
Let’s call those who regard themselves as rational, sober, mature, informed, emotionally stable defenders of common sense and scientific fidelity the soldiers of ‘Consensus Reality Ontologically Certain Knowing’ (CROCK) - upholders of truth. They are camels never straying from the desert of the real. I don’t mean to poke fun at either side. I totally get each side’s point of view. Conspiracy people really are a little too whacked out some of the time. And the CROCK people are too anally uptight for my taste. Con artists always say that those who are most certain they cannot be fooled make the best marks. And at bottom both populations are just people, struggling for survival, satisfaction, and significance in this cold world.
Apart from the validity of any one theory (conventional or conspiratorial), it’s interesting to look at the psychology of both sides. The masters of CROCK love nothing better than armchair psychoanalysis of conspiracy theorists. When they ask themselves why anybody would believe the patently lunatic bullshit which the average conspiracy guy takes as revealed truth, they always come up with some version of the following list:
Ignorance (of science)
Compensation (wanting to feel special)
Anxiety (seeking certainty to alleviate fear)
Boredom (helping to enliven an otherwise lackluster day)
Avarice (selling books, lecture seats)
Perversity (trolls, haters, teenagers)
Let’s go through these one at a time.
Ignorance: The CROCKsters have a point here. Your typical conspiracy theorist is not as well versed in techie subjects as he or she ought to be. Yet they often opine on highly technical areas that lie outside their core competence. (if they even have a core competence).
Compensation: The conspiracy theorist is taken to be a basement-dwelling loser/loner who buttresses himself in the face of the world’s indifference or rejection with the false solace of knowing more than his betters. It’s ego reinforcement. Of course there’s a certain half-life to that. As time passes and the content of any given conspiracy theory becomes more widely known, the cachet of holding ‘secret’ knowledge about what’s really happening tends to diminish.
Anxiety: It’s assumed that the conspiracy theorist can’t handle the harshness of the real world, thus they escape to a fantasy world. A world they can understand, control, interpret to others and generally own.
Boredom: Speaks for itself. Reality can be (perceived as) boring, but with unlimited mental fantasy yarn you can weave any exciting story, of infinite threat or promise.
Avarice: The average conspiracy theorist just poking around the web may not make much, but people who run the larger conspiracy blogs and sites probably make hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars a year from their stuff! Possibly more. With that kind of money in the game, bad actors will always be tempted to try their hand.
Perversity: A non-trivial percentage of conspiracy types are just trouble-making trolls, not even sincere in their wickedness, just spoiling for the attention that a keyboard flame war radiates. These people will say anything for a laugh and to get a rise out of the comically serious and amusingly provoke-able camels of CROCK.
Very satisfying! The trouble is that the above analysis of conspiracy nuts has bilateral symmetry. It’s sauce for both goose and gander. It can easily be turned around and replayed from the other side without loss of generality. Let’s try that.
Ignorance: Here in this one area, the CROCKsters do have valid point. More science is always good. That’s why we need some open proof of the nuclear FEAR hypothesis.
Compensation: Emotional compensation is another double-edged putdown. Isn’t there a lot of emotional satisfaction in feeling that you are a good citizen, a sober soldier of rationality? You command the high ground of logic and proof, you have education, authority and rationality - all on your side. Isn’t that a warm feeling for the orthodox rationalist?
Anxiety: I sometimes wonder why it’s supposed to be much more reassuring to suspect that your government or other trusted authorities are out to scam and kill you or other innocents, rather than reposing in the safe certainty that you are in the soft hands of a responsible, adult, protective authority (CROCK). When CROCK psychologizes and tsk-tsk’s about conspiracy theorists, you’re bound at some point to see a line like this: ‘People love certainty and find uncertainty uncomfortable’. But who is more certain of him or her self than a soldier of CROCK? They know that the USA military would never conduct bioweapons experiments on uninformed enlisted men, nor would the CIA have had programs to influence the media, newspapers, academia, etc. Conspiracy theories are treated like the field of AI, as an infinitely receding horizon. As soon as a conspiracy theory turns out to be true, it’s pulled over the velvet rope of respectability and is no longer credited to the lunatics’ scorecard.
Boredom: I have heard it said, by Richard Dawkins and other defenders of the status quo that reality is much more exciting and beautiful when you look it squarely and honestly in the eye. So I have to assume that CROCKsters are seeking excitement and entertainment by their cleaving to the orthodox, deriving much the same psychological benefit that conspiracy nuts are said to receive from their fantasies.
Avarice: Whoa, champ! Do you really want to throw down on this particular point? I wonder whether the combined total income from books, websites, speaking engagements or other activities of every major conspiracy theorist in the world exceeds the weekly take from a single soda vending machine in one staff lounge at the Lawrence Livermore weapons lab. It certainly doesn’t amount to trillions of dollars, decade after decade.
Perversity: Here I’ll grant that a true soldier of CROCK is not normally a mischievous Internet troll. They have a rigid and passionate sincerity. Credit where due.
The point is that these sides are largely mirror images of one another, satisfying the same needs in opposite ways. The soldiers of CROCK rationality are mostly projecting their own qualities (anxiety, ego, greed, etc.) onto their mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging opposite numbers in the conspiracy camp. That doesn’t mean one side isn’t wrong though. CROCK is probably mostly correct. But isn’t there some value in having a few outliers, like mutant rogue genes that may cause trouble but could be an ace in the hole when a monolithic genome is attacked?
Strange bedfellows pop up in the eternal cat and mouse game of CROCK vs conspiracy. For example, a few years back, a chemical and/or fuel dump blew up in Tianjin, China.
On 12 August 2015, a series of explosions killed 173 people and injured hundreds of others at a container storage station at the Port of Tianjin. The first two explosions occurred within 30 seconds of each other at the facility, which is located in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, China. The second explosion was far larger and involved the detonation of about 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. Fires caused by the initial explosions continued to burn uncontrolled throughout the weekend, repeatedly causing secondary explosions, with eight additional explosions occurring on 15August. The cause of the explosions was not immediately known, but an investigation concluded in February 2016 that an overheated container of dry nitrocellulose was the cause of the initial explosion.
(Wikipedia)
So far so good. But at some point a bunch of conspiracy theorists got all worked up about how this must have been a nuclear explosion. So they trotted out all kinds of crazy numbers about possible yield and temperature and blast effects etc. Now, say what you will about me, call me a whacko nutjob, but at least you’ll never catch me in that particular conspiracy camp. Obviously! Anyway, the defenders of CROCK naturally had to rise to this stupid bait and laboriously debunk the nuke suspicions. Which they did very competently I must say. Hats off. For example, the nuke people were saying: Look at the huge crater! Only a nuke could or would blast out that size of hole! And they trotted out a photo apparently showing a gigantic nasty pit.
But the defenders of the real would have none of it, trumping and silencing the opposition by pointing out that this ‘crater’ was more a man-made lake of sorts, created by natural drainage and filling of a shallow blast depression. The dry version isn’t nearly as scary-looking.
Going farther afield now, imagine the USA mil.gov had indeed created real nukes but, for whatever tactical reason, was intent on keeping them absolutely secret, and was committed to denial, even when they were used? In this alternative world, the mil.gov would have announced that Hiroshima was merely a firebombing, etc. Then, ironically, you’d have ‘conspiracy theorists’ insisting on the existence of nuclear weapons (which in this fantasy scenario, would be true) while the defenders of CROCK, who always toe to the line drawn by authority, would be strenuously debunking, saying how ridiculous it is to talk about crazy science fiction weapons that blow up cities with a few kilograms worth of ‘binding energy’ and proving that the destruction was due to ordinary incendiary raids and so on. Thus do the authorities play us like hand puppets. But I don’t resent them for it. That is their job.
How many times have I said that trickery is the way of war? Is that really such a radical and controversial notion? This has been known since the Trojan Horse.
The great Chinese general Zhu Geliang (181–234 CE) was celebrated for baffling the enemy with his infinite tricks and scams. The world has been at continuous war since the middle of the last century with no end in sight. Though I deplore the inhumanity and waste of it all, deep down I’d frankly be a little disappointed if the leaders and ‘powers that be’ were not creative and energetic enough to come up with some really good scams from time to time, like this nuclear thing. But now maybe enough is enough.
Fire No Time: Falsification
Father, Father, we don’t need to escalate.
War is not the answer,
For only love can conquer hate.
Marvin Gaye
Skeptics (wait, who is the real ‘skeptic’ here anyway?) may retort that this book has presented only circumstantial evidence - no direct proof. And conspiracy theorists are usually derided for seizing obsessively on small, natural anomalies and making a big effing deal of them. Doh! How could it be otherwise? All the direct proof one way or the other is totally classified. A good detective necessarily works from small clues. Anyway, in science it is said that hypotheses (apart from formal math and logic) cannot be proven – they can only be falsified. We’ve gotten off to a good start on that job with this book. The job of proof falls to those who assert the existence of the superweapons.
Perhaps you’re rolling your eyes now, like: DUDE! There’s been megatons of incontrovertible evidence! By that you mean the reports and films of tests, witness testimonies, historical accounts, etc. I get that. But the ultimate falsification would be a city well and truly nuked to green glass parking lot oblivion. It could be yours. So you better hope my FAIL theory is never finally falsified. You better pray that The Bomb is nothing but a flash-bang device for show.
There’s a great story in Richard Rhodes’ classic history of the H-bomb where he tells of a tense moment in the run-up to developing ‘Joe 1’, the first Soviet nuclear weapon.
On one occasion, writes Zukerman, “they were readying an experiment involving a large explosive charge, over one hundred kilograms. Suddenly the charge caught fire. In such cases, the burn can trigger a detonation, with all its consequences. [The group leader] stayed calm and collected. He led his brigade to the bunker and phoned the dispatcher to order everyone to keep away from the area. This time, nature was kind: there was never an explosion and the charge burned down without incident.” Accidents were acts of sabotage in [Beria’s Soviet security regime]. The scientists attributed the fire to spontaneous combustion – a passing bird had shat on the charge, they claimed, and the splash of liquid had functioned as a lens to focus the sunlight. It was a story only technological illiterates would swallow, and the bosses did.
(‘Dark Sun’ Richard Rhodes)
Don’t be those guys. If this book’s FAIL hypothesis is true, that knowledge is guarded way more deeply and fearfully than the compressibility factors for all six (or seven!) allotropes of plutonium. That would be totally ‘Shoot On Sight Eyes Only’ stuff. If, on the other hand, the FEAR hypothesis is correct, the human race is well and truly screwed. Stick a fork in us. We’re done.
FAIL (Fake Atomic Instantaneous Liquidation) for the hypothesis that explosive nukes don’t work. Liquidation might seem a weird term in the technical sense (to refer to the putative adverse effects of atomic explosion), but consider its synonyms: destruction, eradication, annihilation, murder, extermination, carnage. The end of the world as we know it - not. The FAIL hypothesis holds that nuclear weapons are a technical fizzle rebranded for super-sized shock and awe, not to mention a triumph of political/social command and control.
FEAR (Functional Explosive Atomic Reality or if you prefer, the more common spellout: False Evidence Appearing Real) hypothesis
***
Intense infrared energy is released and instantly burns exposed skin for miles in every direction. The soft internal organs (viscera) of humans and animals are evaporated. Nuclear shadows appear for the first time as a result of the extreme thermal radiation. These shadows are outlines of humans and objects that blocked the thermal radiation. Examples are the woman who was sitting on the stairs near the bank of the Ota River. Only the shadow of where she sat remains in the concrete. The shadow of a man pulling a cart across the street is all that remains in the asphalt.
(Atomic Heritage Foundation)
‘… his flesh and blood were all reduced to nothingness’ A Hiroshima ‘nuclear shadow’ of one or more vaporized victims (Why is the wood wall unscathed? Just … don’t ask).
Death Object Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax Akio Nakatani
About the Author
Akio Nakatani is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His research interests include Stochastic Systems, Parameter Estimation, Stochastic Optimization, Monte Carlo Methods and Simulation, Neural Networks, Statistical Pattern Recognition, Statistical Image Analysis, Nonparametric Bayes and Bayesian Hierarchical Models, Time Series, Graphical Models, Nonparametric Bayes and Bayesian Hierarchical Models.
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