Death Object - Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax

(Some extracts from the book)

Trickery is the way of war.
Sunzi

The process of atomic fission produces all kinds of elemental “stuff”:

Plutonium and uranium split unevenly. It is rare that they split into two equal parts, and in the explosion their fragments become every element below them..Anything you can name is there – molybdenum, barium, iodine, cesium, strontium, antimony, hydrogen, tin, copper, carbon, iron, silver, and gold.
(‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ John McPhee)

In that eclectic spirit, this book can be read as a critical assembly of many different elemental traces: primer (Nuclear Bombs for Dummies), history, polemic, prophecy, comedy or tragedy. If you think this topic’s gray and gloomy gravitas rules out any of those, watch Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of atomic humor, Dr. Stranglove, and think again.

If you’re already an atomic skeptic, this book will serve as a handy reference compendium of familiar evidence coherently organized. If you’re a firm believer in the reality of nuclear weapons, this book could make you think twice. If you haven’t considered the subject one way or the other, I can promise you that by the end of this book you’ll have received a larger dosage of nuclear knowledge with less strain and boredom than you’d have thought humanly possible. If I get you thinking more seriously about the implications of atomic weaponry, then as far as I’m concerned – result!

Keep one thing in mind as you read. In addition to all the junky byproducts of a nuclear blast listed above, there’s one other: photon emissions. That’s visible light and it’s what I hope this book can radiate. I think you’ll find it both enlightening (like a stimulating course lecture) and entertaining (like a horror movie).

How could a topic so unthinkably ghastly be entertaining? I don’t mean to disrespect the suffering of anybody injured or killed in any war, by any means – conventional or otherwise. In this world of madness and pain, we need gallows humor. I use levity to reduce our risk of ending up like noted historian Iris Chang, who (it is speculated), spiraled into suicidal depression after interviewing one too many of the survivors of the 20th century’s worst horrors.

As a counter-balance, I advise all readers to browse the Hiroshima memoir Barefoot Gen (manga by Keiji Nakazawa) in parallel. Whenever you tire of the occasional witticism or moment of sarcastic levity in this book, revert to Barefoot Gen. Absorb the madness and mainline the stupefying graphic atrocity as a mood-corrective. The conventional understanding of nuclear history is as true in its function of allegory and metaphor (or warning and prophecy) as it is false in its literal facts.

**

Fire This Time

We must formulate the Fake Atomic Instantaneous Liquidation (FAIL) hypothesis very carefully. Taking the time upfront to sculpt the FAIL correctly can save infinite irrelevant counter-argumentative keystrokes when the FAIL takes the field against its many doubters, mockers, scoffers, debunkers and defenders of orthodoxy. A carefully bounded FAIL is also a lot easier to talk about.

The entire focus of the FAIL is the word ‘weapons’: nuclear weapons do not function. This says nothing about nuclear power, as in power plants or submarine engines. Presumably, it is possible to generate electric power via slow and controlled nuclear fission reactions, which generate heat for steam turbines.

Perhaps some skeptics would take issue with even that limited claim, but I’m not one of those...Clearly nuclear power generation is possible and maybe useful (if the safety and waste issues can be handled). Here I’m looking solely at the putative phenomenon of uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions that release a massive charge of atomic ‘binding energy’ in nanoseconds, vaporizing everything in sight. Counter-arguments to the FAIL must therefore also focus entirely on rapid, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions deployed for military purposes. It’s no use counter-attacking FAIL by citing the reality of nuclear power generation. I’m likewise side-stepping any position, pro or con, on nuclear power safety issues.

Nuclear power plants and nuclear power generation will be cited only when relevant to radiation and fallout from nuclear weapons.

This book doesn’t attempt a full review of the orthodox standard narrative - the claim that explosive nukes exist and function as specified. For convenience let’s call that the FEAR (Functional Explosive Atomic Reality or if you prefer, the more common spellout: False Evidence Appearing Real) hypothesis. FEAR is so widely promulgated, supported, and bolstered on all sides that it needs no further spotlight. Every sane, educated, rational, informed adult citizen of the world feels nuclear FEAR implicitly and wholeheartedly. Only a total idiot would doubt it. Rather than lay out the entire accepted history and theory of nuclear weapons, I will cherry-pick aspects of the conventional story as needed, when I require a foil to make my point. I always attempt to state the orthodox positions in as fair and balanced a way as possible, thus giving FEAR every sporting chance.

Virtual Manhattan Project

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
- John von Neumann

The ultimate mystery about nukes is why, after all these years, from 1946 on, nobody has ever nuked anybody in anger (if you’re reading this by the glow of a green glass parking lot, you may be forgiven a sardonic chuckle). Maybe the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction really is restraining the bloodlust. But the MAD doctrine only applies to nations. National leaders obviously care nothing for the lives in their charge, but they are attached to their palaces and limos. The politicians’ uncertainty as to whether those perks could be up and running quickly enough after a nuke exchange is enough to restrain them - for now. But that doesn’t apply to terrorists who are happy to die for The Cause. So then the question arises of why no terrorist bad guys have yet nuked anything.

The usual answer boils down to lack of these components:

-Materials
-Knowledge
-Infrastructure

It’s assumed that those resources are a ‘bridge too far’ for a terrorist organization. The usual show-stopper statement to avoid the whole topic is:

“You’d need another Manhattan Project.” I could go deeply into all the contradictions and absurdities that abound on this subject. But in this section, I want to discuss whether the FEAR hypothesis is valid.

Given all the restrictions on publicizing the science and design factors that enable explosive fission, it seems we’ve struck out on the ‘replication’ requirement that underlies real science. It appears that all anybody can do it accept spoon-feeding of filmed results and expert testimony. But appearances deceive. There is a way that the validity of explosive fission could be verified. The method outlined in this book is only a thought experiment. It involves no acquisition or use of fissionable materials whatsoever. It is proffered strictly in the service of the search for truth. It must however be said that, sadly, there is no barrier preventing a small group of bad guys, not to mention a nation or sophisticated criminal organization from doing in reality what is outlined here as mere virtuality. And the horrible beauty of the scheme is that, by the precedent of the Manhattan Project, the development procedure sketched here is guaranteed to work.

Is there only enough fissionable material for a single bomb? No problem. By following the procedure here, bad guys could develop a nuclear weapon that works perfectly on first firing – without testing. No classified information would need to be accessed. It is thus the fabled ‘unclassified bomb’. All that’s needed is one bomb’s worth of fissionable material. I’ll cover the materials issue elsewhere.

Now, let’s talk about the knowledge problem and the design challenge for building a 21st century unclassified bomb. If the FEAR hypothesis is correct, this procedure cannot fail to produce a working weapon.

Consider the original Manhattan Project. Forget about the materials problem for a moment (General Groves is on it). The Los Alamos scientists began with a theory and a goal, nothing more. The theory told them that explosive fission should be possible. As far as post-1945 conventional scientific thought is concerned, this theory is true. It was fully validated at Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

So how did they get from their true theory to their realized goal? In terms of anything remotely recognizable today as serious simulation they had only Stone Age tools. They relied on pure brains and instinct, just a wing and prayer. They were like the pinball wizard in the rock opera Tommy, who though deaf, dumb and blind “plays by sense of smell”. Because their theory was true, they were able to develop two different weapon designs and implementations, both of which worked perfectly on the very first full test/use (Trinity and Hiroshima). In achieving this, they did all the heavy lifting for all time. The task of today’s unclassified bomb builder is infinitely simpler and easier than what the Manhattan Project faced in the day. The two challenges should not even be compared.

The Virtual Manhattan Project is built around two essential elements, neither of which was available to the original guys.

1. A reverse-engineered component model.
2. Simulation technology.

With those, it is now possible for, on the one hand, any regular Joe to recruit some friends and build a basement nuke, or on the other hand (more to this book’s purpose) to either verify or debunk the FEAR hypothesis.

The Coster-Mullen Component Model

In technology one sometimes hears about ‘reverse engineering’.

Reverse engineering, also called back engineering, is the process of extracting knowledge or design information from anything man-made and re-producing it or re-producing anything based on the extracted information.
(Wikipedia)

An engineer begins with a fully functional example of a working artifact (anything from an electric toothbrush to a software application) and then figures out what makes it tick by inference based on (i) its performance and/or (ii) disassembly for direct inspection.

An analyst has reverse-engineered the first atomic bombs. John Coster-Mullen’s book ‘Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man’ is a nearly complete design manual for understanding and replicating the simplest original nukes. The book explains every design element and how they all hang together, based on exhaustive review of original documentation and interviews with surviving principals, including scientists, engineers, and military deployment personnel – virtually anyone who had some hand in working on or with the bombs.

C-M’s work has been praised to the skies by heavyweight atomic authorities, including former heads of the USA nuclear weapons laboratories, as the only accurate design analysis of the early nukes. Some have even gone so far as to suggest he’s in violation of national secrecy laws. But everything in the book was derived from unclassified public reference materials harvested by C-M’s laser eyes (poring over hundreds of piecemeal physical prototypes and museum pieces) and his razor logic (applied to establishing connections, catching contradictions and filling in gaps). C-M is clearly the greatest ‘reverse engineer’ of all time. ‘Atom Bombs’ is the how-to manual for the ‘unclassified bomb’ that Los Alamos weapons designer Ted Taylor obsessed about in ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ (John McPhee).

So then why, apart from the few insider grumbles mentioned above (which Coster-Mullen proudly reproduces in the front matter of his book as testimony to authenticity) hasn’t there been more outcry? Why hasn’t Coster-Mullen been spirited away by Men In Black, the book scrubbed from Amazon, and all copies flushed down the Orwellian memory hole? Well, for one thing the USA is still a free country, sort of. After all, the book does not reproduce classified documents or include any illegal information found only in such sources.

But the most important reason for the official tolerance extended to this book is the bogus refrain we’ve heard along: You’d (still) need another Manhattan Project. But if the FAIL hypothesis is true - if explosive fission is for real - then that response is a tragic misreading of the situation.
Once possessed of C-M’s manual, why (under conventional thinking) might you still need another Manhattan Project to produce your unclassified bomb? One thing is the usual sidetrack about fissionable materials. That’s not my main focus in this section, but suffice it to say again: read ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’.

This decades-old book will bleach your hair as you learn how easily bad guys of that time could have possessed themselves of all manner of nasty stuff, including U235 and plutonium, in various forms. Whatever tightening of security and accounting protocols was imposed after the book’s appearance has probably been more than out-run and end-run by the huge accumulation of such materials in the ensuing decades – especially outside the USA.

For now, let’s put the materials thing aside and concentrate on the weapon’s design and function. Decades before C-M’s detailed design manual was available, Los Alamos weapons designer Ted Taylor had this to say about the ‘unclassified nuke’. It’s what I’m talking about here, a proof-of-concept device:

Ted Taylor would like to see Los Alamos or Livermore build and detonate a crude, coarse, unclassified nuclear bomb – unclassified in that nothing done in the bomb’s fabrication would draw on knowledge that is secret. … Taylor’s instructions to Los Alamos would be “Lay off any sophistication altogether. Try to see how sloppy you can get. Then set the thing off underground. Measure the yield. Put a stop to speculation about this subject.”
(‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ John McPhee)

As far as anybody knows, this has never been done. The formulaic response from sophisticated readers to the Taylor challenge above has always been, again:

You’d need your own Manhattan Project. In addition to the C-M manual, there are plentiful public materials to be found in odd places such as the former Encyclopedia Americana, including things like:

…factors of density that could be reached in metallic fissile material with certain levels of implosive force (‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ John McPhee)

Put it all together and you have the blueprint of a bomb. I am most emphatically not suggesting any non-scientist, people working with a nefarious purpose, should pursue this. Why would you want to hurt anybody? Be a lover, not a fighter. No, the purpose of this excursion is to consider whether there’s any way to verify the truth or falsity of the FAIL hypothesis short of physically blowing something up. A thought experiment, if you will.

It turns out there is. And due to the Manhattan Project’s (supposed) existence proof, it’s now way easier than anything that team faced in the 1940’s. All you need is a MacBook. Maybe a MacBook Pro.

**
(...)

With these kinds of sophistication and power requirements, how can I assert that a simulation performed with lesser hardware and software capability is even remotely feasible? Consider the situation that has obtained from the time of Trinity until just recently:

In recent years, physicists at Livermore surmounted one of the oldest and most difficult challenges they faced. In many nuclear weapons explosive tests, measurements suggested that the detonating bombs appeared to violate a law of physics, “conservation of energy,” which states that in a closed system, the total amount of energy remains constant, and thus energy cannot be either created or destroyed. For decades, the nuclear weaponeers puzzled over why the test results appeared to break from this principle. Then, the “energy balance” problem, as it was known, was solved by a Livermore physicist, Omar Hurricane, who won the 2009 E.O. Lawrence Award from the Department of Energy for his work, which remains classified.
(Post article)

Say what?? You have got to be effing kidding me. You mean those early nuclear geniuses, the baddest-ass scientists ever, who got the bomb blowing up first time out, homerun on their first at-bat, with essentially zero system testing, didn’t understand why it worked? They were flying blind? That’s what the above statement appears to suggest, at least for the early hydrogen bombs. A Soviet physicist recalls what he heard about this early uncertainty:

At a conference at Los Alamos in April 1946, where Teller presented the results of his calculations of Classical Super, Bethe made a remark, that the amount of inverse Compton scattering of γ’s (not accounted for by Teller), will result in negative energy balance and that the hydrogen bomb of this type will not explode. In our calculations after hard work we came to the same conclusion – the energy balance was negative.
(Boris Ioffe, Moscow Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics)

Well, that’s ok. We can take a tolerant view. After all, did the Wright Brothers totally understand all of aviation science when they got their gadget off the ground? It’s possible they never even heard of the Bernoulli effect (which may not even be the true/full explanation for aviation ‘lift’ anyway). And Darwin didn’t know about DNA (though he never tried to clone sheep either).

Regardless, we have to admire the original atomic gangsters even more – truly they were real-life embodiments of the blind pinball wizard, with crazy flipper fingers and such a supple wrist.

At least the Wright Brothers were able to do wind test and other engineering integration testing, step by step. But even powered flight is way simpler than building an atomic bomb that works first time out. You have to admire the Manhattan Project’s achievement:

Wrong, confused, or poorly understood theory Dozen or hundreds of control and sequencing parameters estimated ‘manually’ No integration testing prior to first major demonstration At this point we could drag out the tired cliché about ‘the probability that a tornado ripping through a junkyard will spontaneously assemble a 747’. But you won’t catch me saying that. Because you don’t need monster arrays of 20 petaflop machines to do the parameter setting for your working bomb.

All you need is:

1. primitive-but-workable Manhattan Project level of theory
2. some public domain data tables
3. C-M’s model of components, layout and process
4. a decent laptop computer
5. Matlab and/or Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud and/or any other standard machine learning tools suite

With the above in hand, you can reverse-engineer the one remaining necessary item – the final classified ‘secret sauce’ of the Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki bombs – the parameter settings. I’m using the term ‘parameter setting’ in a broad sense for anything variable in the device such as amount and quality of core materials, dimensions of everything, timing, and all else that needs to be numerically specified or controlled.

***
Fool Me Twice: Japan 1945

Hiroshima

Everything in a 2 mile radius of the explosion’s epicenter was vaporized.
(‘The Manhattan Project: The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ Al Cimino)

There you have it. ‘Everything’ was ‘vaporized’. Including the people. But wait:

The [nuclear] scientist later became annoyed with me when I showed him a paper in which I had written that many people in Hiroshima were “vaporized” by the bomb. He pointed out that the correct term was “carbonized”. “That’s the problem with nonscientists: you are so sloppy with detail,” he added.
(‘People of the Bomb’ Hugh Gusterson)

Hmm… another multi-cultural moment. But I’m inclined to be more forgiving about that kind of sloppiness. Sometimes it’s hard to know, in Marvin Gaye’s immortal words, what’s going on. Even when bodies aren’t vaporized, merely carbonized, can we really be certain it was an effect of The Bomb? What would you say about the bodies in this photograph? Atomic carbonization? Or conventional napalm cooking?

(...)
What honest commander would turn his back on the AK, destroy all plans, and never look at it again? It smells more like concealing the evidence on a strictly Kabuki shell of an atomic ‘weapon’. Basically it was abandoned after Hiroshima.

After the war ended, it was not expected that the inefficient Little Boy design would ever again be required, and many plans and diagrams were destroyed.
(Wikipedia)

Excuse me? This thing that cost umpteen billions in today’s money, that functioned perfectly under combat conditions without integration testing, the very model of AK-style weapons design philosophy – and they destroyed plans and diagrams? They dumped it? No, wait. The “inefficient Little Boy” design, or that design family, was in fact manufactured for deployment, and the same basic type was (supposedly) fired off exactly 3 more times:

(1) A test firing of the W9 11-inch nuclear artillery shell in test shot Upshot-Knothole Grable on May 25, 1953 (Wikipedia)

(2) The W33 was an American nuclear artillery shell, fired from an eight-inch (203 mm) M110 howitzer and M115 howitzer. A total of 2,000 W33 projectiles were produced, the first of which was manufactured in 1957. The W33 remained in service until 1992.The W33 is the third known model of gun-type fission weapons to have been detonated as a test. The W33 was tested twice, first in Operation Plumbbob Laplace, on September 8, 1957 (yield of 1 kt), and the TX-33Y2 in Operation Nougat Aardvark on May 12, 1962, with a yield of 40 kilotons.
(Wikipedia)

So despite the fact that the tech specs and diagrams were destroyed, it was reinvented from scratch, was manufactured, and “remained in service” until 1992. This again shows how simple and perfect a design it was, that it was cobbled together again after being decommissioned and having its tech specs destroyed. The whole story of the ‘gun’ design bombs reminds me of Wile E..Coyote setting up for a shot at Roadrunner.

I’m sure there were good secret reasons for all these illogical actions and conflicting claims. So let’s confine ourselves to the deeper question: was there no integration testing… because they were so sure it would work? Or because they’d become so sure it wouldn’t work that they’d made other plans for staging a fake Japan atomic operation, and could relax about Little Boy’s performance (assuming there even was any sincere attempt at a functional Little Boy in the first place)? There are two situations where no test is run: when you know it works, and when you know it doesn’t.

Firestorm!

A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Although the word has been used to describe certain large fires, the phenomenon’s determining characteristic is a fire with its own storm-force winds from every point of the compass. The Black Saturday bushfires and the Great Peshtigo Fire are examples of forest fires with some portion of combustion due to a firestorm.

Firestorms can also occur in cities, usually as a deliberate effect of targeted explosives such as occurred as a result of the aerial firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
(Wikipedia)

The Hiroshima firestorm probably caused more damage than the blast itself. The general effect of a firestorm (for example, in Dresden) has been explained as follows:

Consider the use of precision saturation (incendiary) bombing in Dresden. At 10:09 AM, the first bombs were dropped unleashing a massive firestorm. Gigantic masses of air were then sucked in by the expanding inferno creating something similar to a tornado. People caught in this wind were mercilessly tossed into the flame, while those seeking protection underground suffocated as the fire gasped for more oxygen. The least fortunate were those who died from a blast of white heat which has temperatures so high it literally melts human skin.
(Eric Roberts)

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who was present in Dresden at the time, commented:

You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Another analyst comments:

How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? U.S. bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from blast; they completely ignored damage from atomic firestorms. Recently a small group of researchers has shown that for modern nuclear weapons the destructiveness and lethality of nuclear mass fire often--and predictably--greatly exceeds that of nuclear blast.
(Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs))

They ask a good question. Why minimize nuclear-ignited firestorms? The problem is that firestorms can arise from causes other than nuclear, and have effects that are all too similar to supposed nuclear outcomes. It seems the brass at the time were anxious that nobody start to line up and too closely compare the ‘atomic’ outcomes against those of conventional firebombing raids.

Beginning with an incendiary raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945 which Japanese records showed killed 83,793 and burned out 267,000 buildings (25% of Tokyo’s buildings), sixty-four Japanese cities were destroyed by non-nuclear air raids.

The detailed and objective analysis of these incendiary air raids was classified “Restricted” in April 1947 by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in its unpublished limited distribution typeset and printed report Number 90, Effects of Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan; Part 3 (pages 65-118) documents the effects of the 9 March 1945 Tokyo incendiary raid, with photos on pages 104-109 very similar to the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (combustible light frame buildings burned out with their steel distorted by the fires, and piles of charred bodies in streets). By omitting to publish this, an objective comparison of nuclear with conventional attacks was prevented.

(‘The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan’ - U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report) In fact, the damage patterns of the supposed atomic attacks were nearly identical to previously observed firestorm effects.

Although fashionable books on Hiroshima tend to print pictures of the “blasted” twisted metal beams of the Odamasa Store (former Taiyo Theatre), USSBS building 52 at 2,800 feet from ground zero, page 322 explains it is an effect of fire: “Severe distortion caused by burning of combustible construction and contents.” Furthermore, similar twisting of metal frames in wooden buildings occurred in the Tokyo incendiary attack, but those photos remained Restricted. It is not a special “nuclear” effect, nor are the burned bodies in the streets of Tokyo photographed after the main non-nuclear attack, despite all the polemic and inaccurate claims attacking civil defense.
(U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)

Anyway let’s get back to nature for a moment, let’s talk trees.

Pic

This picture is described as follows by conventional histories:
Fat Man snapped trees at Nagasaki; the less powerful Hiroshima bomb only knocked them down.
(‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ Richard Rhodes) There are spindly looking tree remnants to the right side of that Nagasaki picture which appear not only unsnapped, but still upright. What, other than a massive atomic blast of 20 kilotons (Fat Man), could have ‘snapped’ (or maybe we should say ‘splintered’) those trees? A firestorm, that’s what.

Exploding trees occur when stresses in a tree trunk increase leading to an explosion. Exploding trees occur during forest fires and are a risk to smokejumpers. In Australia, the native eucalyptus trees are known to explode during bush fires due to the high flammability of vaporized eucalyptus oil produced by the tree naturally.
(Wikipedia)

The Nagasaki trees photo looks a lot like the usual jumbled mix of upright, damaged, toppled, and snapped wood that you see in the aftermath of any major forest fire.

Pic

That does not completely rule out a nuclear blast. After all, by conventional hypothesis, nuclear detonations themselves actually produce firestorms at some point (presumably even when not helped along by residential cooking and kitchen fires, as well as electrical shorts). But it shows that nuclear explosion need not be fixed on as the only possible cause of that kind of damage. With those photos as reference, let’s look at blown-up Hiroshima.

(...)

Seversky

Alexander P. de Seversky (June 7, 1894 – August 24, 1974) was a Russian-American aviation pioneer, inventor, and influential advocate of strategic air power. He made an inspection tour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after the war’s end. His observations and conclusions are particularly valuable as he had extensive personal experience in bombing and aerial warfare, as well as a deep conceptual and theoretical understanding of explosives and blast effects. His trip report was published in a 1946 magazine article, which was reprised at greater depth as a chapter in his 1950 book ‘Air Power: Key to Survival’.

Seversky is sometimes charged with bias. It’s sometimes said that he misleadingly minimized atomic weapons’ horrifying power, the better to either forestall or assuage American public guilt over dropping the bomb on prostrate Japan. That’s a ridiculous charge because in 1946 there was precious little guilt to worry about. The public overwhelmingly approved the bomb’s use.

Nor was there much fear to calm. The USA was the sole possessor of nuclear weapons. It’s more likely that Seversky’s observations were exactly what they come across as – the candidly stated assessment of a rational, sober and highly knowledgeable military man (who believed implicitly in the existence of the atom bomb, and who merely disputed some of the hype about its effects). This report did little to endear him to an American political regime eager to instill fear in new post-war adversaries.

After visiting the major areas of the Pacific, I arrived in Japan. I began the study to which I had been assigned by making an aerial tour of the islands of Honshu and Kyushu, which encompass the main portion of industrial Japan. I flew over Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Akashi, and dozens of other towns and cities which had been subject to intensive air attack. Some of these towns are so close together that they seem almost continuous industrial sites.

All of these areas of annihilation presented approximately the same visual pattern. The smaller towns were totally burned out. Seen from above the prevailing color was pinkish – the effect produced by the piles of ashes and rubble mixed with rusted metal.

 Similar pinkish carpets were spread out in the larger cities, except that among them stood large and small modern concrete buildings and factory structure, unscathed bridges, and other objects that had withstood the impact. Many of the buildings, of course, were gutted by fire, but this was not apparent from the air.

I was keyed up for my first view of an atom-bombed city, prepared for the radically new sights suggested by the exciting descriptions I had read and heard.

But to my utter astonishment, Hiroshima from the air looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities I had observed!

There was a familiar pink blot, about two miles in diameter. It was dotted with charred trees and telephone poles. Only one of the city’s twenty bridges was down. Hiroshima’s clusters of modern buildings in the downtown section stood upright. It was obvious that the blast could not have been so powerful as we had been led to believe. It was extensive blast rather than intensive. I had heard of buildings instantly consumed by unprecedented heat. Yet here I saw the buildings structurally intact, and what is more, topped by undamaged flag poles, lightning rods, painted railings, air raid precaution signs and other comparatively fragile objects.

At the T-bridge, the aiming point for the atomic bomb, I looked for the “bald spot” where everything presumably had been vaporized in the twinkling of an eye. It wasn’t there or anywhere else. I could find no traces of unusual phenomena. What I did see was in substance a replica of Yokohama or Osaka, or the Tokyo suburbs - the familiar residue of an area of wood and brick houses razed by uncontrollable fire. Everywhere I saw the trunks of charred and leafless trees, burned and unburned chunks of wood. The fire had been intense enough to bend and twist steel girders and to melt glass until it ran like lava - just as in other Japanese cities.

The concrete buildings nearest to the center of explosion, some only a few blocks from the heart of the atom blast, showed no structural damage. Even cornices, canopies and delicate exterior decorations were intact. Window glass was shattered, of course, but single-panel frames held firm; only window frames of two or more panels were bent and buckled. The blast impact therefore could not have been unusual.
(Reader’s Digest 1946 Alexander P. de Seversky)

There is no mention of any kind of blast crater under ‘air zero’. It may be that the detonation altitude was too great for that (1,900 feet). It also may be that in a built-up enemy city even a shallow crater is difficult to fudge, fake, or dig on short notice. Anywhere within either blast ring, you’d expect trees – if nothing else - to be pretty much wiped clean off the earth, vaporized, flung around like toothpicks in a hurricane, except possibly where shielded by concrete buildings. Quite a number of plants not only remained upright, but actually survived in the most intense areas, to bloom again the following year.

A-bombed trees are trees that survived the atomic bombing of 6 August 1945. Some 170 trees, in 55 locations within the roughly 2km radius of the hypocenter, are officially registered by Hiroshima Municipality as A-bombed trees. Lovingly cared for over the years by authorities, botanists, various citizens’ groups and individuals, they are identified by a name plate and the unique reference:

hibakujumoku (survivor tree). These survivors of nuclear tragedy carry a significant message - not just for those living in or visiting Hiroshima, but for all of humanity.
(United Nations Institute for Training and Research)

Maybe this book embodies the plants’ ‘significant message’.

What’s Going On?

If the Trinity test is the most intellectually demanding event confronting the nuclear skeptic, then dealing with the accounts of people on the ground who actually suffered and died in these events (whatever caused them) is the greatest emotional challenge.

I don’t have space to go deeply into the body count game. There are a variety of estimates of how many dead, wounded, sickened, and a lot of quibbling about what killed who when. Estimates can differ by many tens of thousands depending on your starting assumptions and methodology. Not to mention that everybody brings some kind of minimization or maximization bias to the table. Suffice it to say it’s all plenty damn horrible no matter how you slice it. And it’s all plenty damn horrible no matter how it was done – by science or fire, by land, sea or air. War is hell – nobody is disputing that.

But I have to keep tracking my technical subject - the FAIL hypothesis. So I won’t be talking much about, say, the real population figures for Hiroshima in early August 1945 (pre-attack). Some accounts say the starting population was greatly exaggerated and that because of evacuations and lack of shipping activity in the port, the city had largely emptied out. At the very least, initial population estimates should take into account that after years of urban air attacks, most cities had been partially evacuated.

Overall, 8.5 million Japanese civilians were displaced as a result of the American raids, including 120,000 of Hiroshima’s population of 365,000 who evacuated the city before the atomic bomb attack on it in August 1945.
(Wikipedia)

That estimate cuts against the grain of the usual fable about pre-attack Hiroshima as some kind of idyllic island of peace in the sea of flames that otherwise engulfed Japanese cities at the time. It’s sometimes said that the residents of Hiroshima lived almost as normal nearly to the end, with only a weird feeling of invulnerability due to having been ‘spared’ up to that point. But accounts in some Japanese sources tell of a largely emptied city, with work details pulling down houses for firebreaks (‘Clearance Project’) and other somewhat spiritless civil defense activities predominating. Whatever the case, I can’t get into all that.

There are some very impressive collections of heartbreaking survivor testimonies, beginning with the 1959 book ‘Children of the A-Bomb’ (English language edition) by Dr. Arata Osada. This book contains over sixty terrible first-person narratives from children on the ground. Most of them date from 1951. So presumably there were obstacles delaying Dr. Osada’s publication. The soul-searing accounts of loss, desolation, and destruction wouldn’t paint the American occupiers in the kindliest light. Many of these have a close variation of the following line in the first paragraph:

Just as we saw a bright flash there was a loud bang and I almost fainted.
(Sanae Kanoh, 5th grade girl)

These lines fit the profile as given by standard histories.

Some of them have some interesting twists though:

I often heard the words, ‘Air raids’ and ‘The war’ and I remember them clearly..‘Today evacuation, tomorrow evacuation.’ And then every day we wandered around places we had never seen before searching for a safe place to live. Those who didn’t have any acquaintances in the country finally returned to the city. We were living in Hakushima. … Mother and my three older sisters and I seated day after day at digging a shelter to which we would entrust the lives of the five of us. In July the air raids became more frequent and by the middle of the month they came as though by schedule. At half-past eight in the evening the air raids began, accompanied by the rasping sound from the radio. Each one with his particular belongings in hand jumped down into the shelter… Every time, praying in our hearts that we would all continue to be safe, we would wait for the dawn. When morning comes and the all-clear sounds, we all crowd out of the shelter.
(Masataka Asaeda, 9th grade boy)

This is bad enough, but it does not seem entirely compatible with the usual ‘reserved city’ narrative. Maybe this boy’s account wasn’t edited quite heavily enough leaving it out of alignment with the book’s overall orientation.

The Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law defines hibakusha as people who fall into one or more of the following categories: within a few kilometers of the hypocenters of the bombs; within 2 km of the hypocenters within two weeks of the bombings; exposed to radiation from fallout; or not yet born but carried by pregnant women in any of these categories. The Japanese government has recognized about 650,000 people as hibakusha. As of March 31, 2016, 174,080 are still alive, mostly in Japan. The government of Japan recognizes about 1% of these as having illnesses caused by radiation.
(Wikipedia)

Many of the book’s children fall under the second provision of the hibakusha specification: ‘within 2 km of the hypocenters within two weeks of the bombings’. That’s because many of the respondents were not in the city at the time of the attack, as they had been evacuated. But most of them had homes and relatives in the city. Beyond this pioneering book, decades later there is now a web-based archive of over 3,000 very similar accounts by hibakusha (被爆者 atomic bomb victims).

What can be concluded? In a way, it’s simple: either (i) nukes work as advertised and Little Boy wiped out Hiroshima in an instant, or (ii) the attack was a nuclear psy-op painted over the canvas of a real incendiary and high explosive attack.

One or the other is the truth. If the former, it is interesting that after the first paragraph of these reports, the bulk of the material is always perfectly compatible with the horrors of WWII incendiary and high explosive air raids, as experienced all over Europe and Japan up to that time.

On 13 February 1945, Victor Gregg was a 25-year-old British rifleman being held by the Germans in the beautiful city of Dresden. At about 10.30 pm, the air-raid sirens started wailing, and because this happened every night no notice was taken. But after a short period of silence, a wave of pathfinders started to drop target flares. We saw them … filling the sky with blinding light, dripping burning phosphorus on to the streets and houses. The flares were still falling when the initial stream flew over, dropping thousands of incendiaries along with the first bombs. … and the sky changed from a bright white to a dull red... about four incendiaries burst through our glass roof… shredding the luckless men beneath. The phosphorus clung to the bodies of the injured, turning them into human torches,... and their screaming was added to the other cries....

Suddenly, a “blockbuster” dropped outside our building, blowing in the whole wall. (These thin-walled, massive missiles could demolish whole blocks with one explosion, hence the name.) I was thrown nearly 50ft and covered in brickwork and rubble… the smoke and fumes from the building’s burning shell were now being swept away by a gradually rising wind…. Wherever I turned, I was confronted with flames, smoke and dust – and all the time blocks of debris falling from the sky… Survivors were clawing their way through mounds of rubble that an hour before had been their homes. We stumbled along the remains of a wide avenue, flanked by fires and mountains of red-hot wreckage. (I was saved by my wooden soles, which were so thick that I could walk over the glowing cinders.) ..

.. The new bombs were so big that you could see them in the sky. Even the incendiaries were different – not metre-long sticks, but four-ton objects that exploded on the ground, incinerating anything within a radius of 200ft – and raining down with these came more blockbusters, 10-tonners this time.

Everything was in flames, even the roads, which were burning rivers of bubbling and hissing tar. Huge fragments of material flew through the air, sucked into the vortex. We could see people being torn from whatever they were hanging on to and drawn into the ever-deepening red glow less than 200 yards away. A small group tried to reach us by crossing what had once been a road, only to get themselves stuck in a bubbling mass of molten tar. One by one, they sank to the ground through sheer exhaustion and then died in a pyre of smoke and flame.

People of all shapes, sizes and ages were slowly sucked into the vortex, then suddenly whisked into the pillars of smoke and fire, their hair and clothing alight. ..above the wind’s howl and the inferno’s roar came the interminable, agonised screams of the victims being roasted alive. ... It was a sea of flame rising into a sky of smoke. .. When the raid ended, we continued with the cellars, prising them open .. Inside, we found the victims’ bodies, usually shrivelled to half their normal size or worse. (Children under the age of three or four had simply melted.) Some of the corpses were so brittle that they crumbled into clouds of ash and dried flesh. We set off to a small square, where what had been grass was now a bed of ash 4in thick, and the first three shelters we uncovered were empty. Trudging through streets where sheets of flame were still shooting up 100ft, we came to the door of a communal shelter, which took all afternoon to prise open.

.. a terrible smell hit us – and slowly the horror inside became visible. There were no real, complete bodies, only bones and scorched articles of clothing matted together on the floor and stuck together by a sort of jelly. There was no flesh visible, just a glutinous mass of solidified fat and bones, inches thick, on the floor.
(‘Dresden, a Survivor’s Story’ Victor Gregg)

That kind of thing is pretty much what you read in ‘Children of the A-Bomb’, following the initial ‘standardized’ paragraph of each report.

If, on the other hand, the FAIL hypothesis is true, then the first paragraph of each account in ‘Children of the A-Bomb’ has been consciously or unconsciously edited to bring it into line with atomic gospel. After the Occupation ended, there may have been less pressure to keep the USA military looking good, and more emphasis on building an international image for Japan of striving for peace and human harmony etc. The unique suffering described in the ‘A-Bomb’ book – whatever caused it - certainly worked towards that end, because most of the reports conclude with a somewhat formulaic plea for peace and renunciation of weapons and war forever. Make it so!

One of the most interesting stories of adult survival is the saga of Kenji Hirata, who by ill or good luck lived to tell about both the atomic attacks of August, 1945. After losing his wife in the Hiroshima bombing, he caught a train over to Nagasaki and managed to live through the second bombing there. Hirata’s amazing experience is illuminating because it plumbs the depths and tests the boundaries of virtually every dimension of this historically complex event – time, space, physics, logistics, and raw human emotion.

Hirata’s story has been movingly rendered by author Charles Pellegrino in his book ‘The Last Train from Hiroshima’. In a nutshell, Hirata was working in the Hiroshima area that morning at a plant four kilometers distant from ground zero. He survived the blast, though it was a very close call. However, Setsuko, his new bride, was unfortunately at their home downtown, almost directly beneath ‘air zero’ - the detonation point. She was vaporized and their house was destroyed.

After somewhat recovering himself that morning, Hirata bravely ventured into the firestorm, heading to his house to find his wife. When he arrived at the site, no trace of her could be found. A few neighbors who had survived by lucky accidents of positioning explained what had happened there, so close to ground zero. Realizing that the situation was hopeless, Hirata resolved to gather a few fragments of material representing his wife’s remains and to return with them to the couple’s original hometown – Nagasaki. He took a train from Hiroshima and arrived in Nagasaki in time to experience and survive the second bombing. He later remarried and  lived quietly for many years, avoiding publicity and keeping his almost unique experience untold until Pellegrino brought it to the world in the last years of Hirata’s life. It began for Hirata that morning at his workplace:

Kenshi had been working as an accountant at the Mitsubishi Weapons Plant, slightly more than four kilometers [2.5 miles] away. A young woman nearby had crept to a window and peeked outside. Whatever she saw in the direction of the city, Kenshi would never know. She stood up, uttered something guttural and incomprehensible, and then the blast wave—lagging far behind the bomb’s light waves—caught up with her. By the time the windowpanes traveled a half-meter, they had separated completely from their protective cross-hatched net of air-raid tape, emerging as thousands of tiny shards. Like the individual pellets of a shotgun blast, each shard had been accelerated to more than half the speed of sound. The girl at the window took at least a quarter-kilogram of glass in her face and her chest before the wind jetted her toward the far wall. Kenshi did not see where she eventually landed. Simultaneous with the window blast, the very floor of the building had come off its foundation and bucked him more than a half-meter into the air.
(‘Surviving the Last Train From Hiroshima: The Poignant Case of a Double Hibakusha’ Charles Pellegrino)

The exact location of the Mitsubishi plant relative to Hiroshima city topography isn’t given, but note the extreme power of these terrifying effects at four kilometers distance: “blast wave”, “windowpanes traveled a half meter”, “shotgun blast”, “half the speed of sound”, “wind jetted her toward the far wall”, “floor [came] off its foundation”, “bucked him more than a half-meter into the air”. It was an almost unsurvivable impact. The speed of sound is 767 mph. Half that is 383 mph. 10 psi impact is equivalent to 294 mph winds. The blast here was hitting with well over 10 psi pressures, nearly twice the threshold of a Category 5 hurricane, which begins at 157 mph. Fortunately Hirata came through it all right, having ducked down behind cover at the last moment.

2.3 miles (3.7 kilometers) from hypocenter Isao Kita. Age at impact: 33 years old

KITA: Well, at that time, I happened to be receiving the transmission over the wireless. I was in the receiving room and I was facing northward. I noticed the flashing light. It was not really a big flash. But still it drew my attention. In a few seconds, the heat wave arrived. After I noticed the flash, white clouds spread over the blue sky. It was amazing. It was as if blue morning-glories had suddenly bloomed up in the sky. It was funny, I thought. Then came the heat wave. It was very very hot. Even though there was a window glass in front of me, I felt really hot. It was as if I was looking directly into a kitchen oven. I couldn’t bear the heat for a long time. Then I heard the cracking sound. I don’t know what made that sound, but probably it came from the air which suddenly expanded in the room.

By that time, I realized that the bomb had been dropped. As I had been instructed, I pushed aside the chair and lay with my face on the floor. Also as I had been instructed during the frequent emergency exercises, I covered my eyes and ears with hands like this. And I started to count. You may feel that I was rather heartless just to start counting. But for us, who observed the weather, it is a duty to record the process of time, of various phenomena. So I started counting with the light flash. When I counted to 5 seconds, I heard the groaning sound. At the same time, the window glass was blown off and the building shook from the bomb blast. So the blast reached that place about 5 seconds after the explosion.
(Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK)

Kita’s testimony above is one of the most interesting. It almost seems he had prior knowledge of a single super bomb and its features. The ‘count’ that he talks about would not be especially relevant in the case of anything Japan had experienced up to that point. Furthermore, he says “as I had been instructed… I lay with my face on the floor. … I covered my eyes and ears with my hands”.

The actions taken by Kita are very much like the instructions to the Trinity witnesses. I have never read that kind of account of a Japanese wartime emergency drill. Normally they were concerned first and foremost with evacuation:

“During World War II, we [ran and] hid in air raid shelters wearing masks when we heard the sirens,” said Reinosuke Ishigaki, an 89-year old resident.

(CNN March 19, 2017) 2.54 miles (4.1 kilometers) from hypocenter Hiroshi Sawachika. Age at impact: 28 years old

SAWACHIKA: I was in my office. I had just entered the room and said “Good morning.” to colleagues and I was about to approach my desk when outside it suddenly turned bright red. I felt very hot on my cheeks. Being the chief of the room, I shouted to the young men and women in the room that they should evacuate. As soon as I cried, I felt weightless as if I were an astronaut. I was then unconscious for 20 or 30 seconds. When I came to, I realized that everybody including myself was lying at one side of the room. Nobody was standing. The desks and chairs had also blown off to one side. At the windows, there was no window glass and the window frames had been blown out as well.
(Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK)

Now let’s pick up the trail with Hirata again. Two days after the atomic attack on Hiroshima, he took a train departing from Koi Station heading for Nagasaki. Koi Station is located 2.29 kilometers from the Hiroshima hypocenter – much closer than Hirata’s workplace to ground zero, about half the distance.

We can’t expect blast effects to be strictly linear with distance, and particularly not in a heterogeneous urban landscape. But, while blast effects could vary widely depending on a building’s exact orientation, construction, and intervening structures, still we do find an extreme contrast between the supposed effects on Hirata’s workplace compared to the situation at Koi Station – half the distance from the hypocenter:

During the war, today’s Nishihiroshima Station, run by the Japan Railway Company, was called Koi Station, and Hiroden Nishihiroshima Station, run by the Hiroshima Electric Railway, was called Nishihiroshima Station or Koi. Both stations were about 2.4 km from the hypocenter. According to the Record of the Hiroshima A-bomb Disaster, Koi Station, part of the National Railway back then, was largely destroyed in the A-bomb blast. The 20 or 30 staff members of the station crept out from the wreckage to the train tracks. Because of the black rain that fell in the aftermath, damage from fire was minimal. As the bomb was dropped after both the inbound and outbound trains had left the station before 8 a.m., there were few passengers in the station at the time. The Sanyo Line was restored by the National Railway on August 8. A streetcar line, the Miyajima Line operated by the Hiroshima Electric Railway, was unable to continue service between Nishihiroshima and Kusatsu Station on August 6, but the streetcar continued running between Kusatsu and Miyajima. The next day, streetcars began running end to end on the Miyajima Line, carrying many survivors.

Another streetcar line in the city center, between Koi and Nishitenma (present-day Tenmacho) resumed operations on August 9.
(Chugoku News Service)

Some station staff may possibly have been killed, but there is no mention of fatalities. Given that “20 or 30” personnel are mentioned as surviving, we can assume staff casualties were not significant. That conclusion is supported by the rapidity with which inter-city service on the Sanyo line was restored. Trains were apparently running in and out by the next day but one. That conclusion in turn is supported by the photographic evidence, showing little apparent damage to the complex trestle and track structure. This is an amazing outcome, given what happened at twice the distance from ground zero, as we’ve seen in the testimonials.

By contrast with the Hiroshima case, after the 1995 Kobe earthquake (magnitude 6.9) the New York Times reported: Railroad officials estimate it will take at least three months to repair tracks and bridges.

An earthquake of Richter scale 6.0 releases energy of ~15 kilotons – which is the approximate yield of the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (~16 kt).
(Wikipedia: ‘TNT equivalent for seismic energy yield’)

It’s true that earthquakes of 6.9 magnitude are much worse than 6.0 magnitude quakes. And presumably they’re much worse than “16 kt” atom bombs (which are intentionally designed, deployed, and deliberately targeted by enemies to destroy things… hmm). And an earthquake affects a wider area. So let’s cut that 90-day (minimum) repair estimate massively - by a factor of 10. Nine days is still significantly longer than two days, and would have blocked Hirata’s train to Nagasaki. Furthermore, the epicenter of the Kobe quake was on the northern end of Awaji Island - 20 kilometers away from the city proper. The Kobe tracks were made with far sturdier and more sophisticated construction techniques and much greater repair resources were available for the job, by comparison with wartime ‘just nuked’ Hiroshima.

Anyway, the testimonies of Hirata, Sawachika, and Kita do seem fully consistent among themselves. They all give clear evidence for effects (damage and casualties) within the 5 psi blast contour. Actually, more like effects within the 10 psi contour. But when you put those testimonies up against actual and hypothetical blast contour maps, things get weird.

Pic

In order to get 5 psi effects at the distances indicated in the set of personal testimonies above, you would need a bomb of about 100 kilotons – more than six times the conventionally reported Little Boy yield of 15 kilotons. Actually, I’m being generous, because the height of detonation in the nuke map 100 kiloton blast overlay at Hiroshima ground zero is set to maximize the range of 5 psi effect, not the actual reported height. Furthermore, in the map shown, even the 5 psi contour extends significantly less than 4 kilometers. These generous concessions are sufficient to more than cover any worries that the damage in the testimonies was possibly characteristic of “only” 4 or 3 psi. To push the 5 psi ring out to the location of the most distant testimony would take an absurdly large yield.

If there really were all these 5 psi effects that far out, at 4 kilometers or more (thus indicating a 100 kiloton yield), then what about Koi Station? Recall its location - about 2 kilometers from the hypocenter. Under this new estimate of yield, supported by the testimonies, Koi Station would have been subjected to 10 psi (or greater) effects. Yet the staff survived, the tracks were ok, and service was quickly restored.

We have a choice here. We can:

1. accept the testimonies of the moment of blast, but
2. discount any report of taking trains from Koi within two days, and also
3. massively upgrade the estimate of Little Boy’s power.

Or, we can:

1. accept the train service story, and
2. retain the Little Boy yield estimate of 15 kilotons – but then
3. discount the survivor testimonies above (and a number of other similar accounts).

But the whole package together isn’t self-consistent, and whichever option we go with, we will be required to discount at least a portion of Hirata’s testimony. I am not, by the way, impugning Pellegrino’s integrity here. He’s a respected scientist and successful author with impressive Hollywood connections. Even the most scrupulous analyst can be taken in by unreliable testimony from an apparently credible witness. That could happen to any of us.

Further confirmation of these estimates of blast strength comes from official USA archives:

Between zero point and the main building of the novitiate of Jesuits four miles away, was a hill which served to lessen the intensity of the blast. Yet despite this protection, all the windows were shattered and part of the wall blown in. The chapel, which is the left wing of the building, is built of timber with plaster walls. The glass in the foyer windows was shattered and the roof was blown loose by the force of the explosion occurring four miles away.
(‘The Atom Strikes’ 1945)

Here, at four miles distance, we see blast effects of at least 1.5 psi, possibly greater (note the intervening hill). Those effects at that distance require the 100-kiloton bomb, just as with the other testimonies.

Medical Testimony

Professor Richard Muller (U.C. Berkeley) has stated that: “The death from radiation and radioactivity in Hiroshima was really quite small. Mostly it was the blast.” This seems to be borne out by interview statements from Brigadier General Crawford F. Sams (chief of Public Health and Welfare Section of the General Headquarters, Supreme Allied Powers from October 2, 1945 until June, 1951.) Sams was not a nuclear weapons skeptic. He did assume and believe that an atomic weapon was detonated over Hiroshima. All the more reason to take his assessment of the actual situation regarding radiation sickness deaths seriously.

It’s interesting to sense the tension that apparently existed at the time between those who wanted to play up atomic horrors (either as a deterrent to war or as macho posturing) and those who wanted to play them down (to appear humanitarian).

Nothing could be established in Japan by any agency from the United States without our permission. The Manhattan Project was very interested in assessing the damage done by the atomic bomb, and so other agencies were. The Public Health Service sent over a mission, the Navy sent over people. I had a dozen different groups of medical people in, wanting to know about the effects of the atomic bomb, which was under my control. I had taken the first group down on the second of September, no, it was about the third,– into Hiroshima. I sent down six plane loads and went down to introduce some of our medical people. When I was first in Hiroshima and landed this group, I got on the radio and some professor from Columbia was saying that “anybody who got into Hiroshima in the next fifty years would die of radiation.” We’d get this nonsense all the time.

I set up, out there then, a Joint Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. The American thing was authorized and financed from the United States – the Atomic Energy Commission – but we got the Ministry of Health and Welfare to set up a commission there and so it was jointly staffed with the Japanese. We set up a long-term project on the effects of this radiation.

I mentioned deterrents against war. There was a letter brought over, in which the President was looking for a new deterrent against a future war, because air power had failed. You know, “If you have another war, air power will destroy civilization,” and it failed because it hadn’t even brought Germany to its knees.

A strategic bomb survey over there showed that military production had increased actually during our bombings. So the object of Letter of Instruction, was “You will play up the devastating effect of the atomic bomb.” I was the one who set the deadline. Anybody who had been in Hiroshima and died within six months, whether they got run over by a bicycle or whatnot, would be credited to the atomic bomb. 

Most of the casualties occurred from thermal readings.

The atomic bomb went off and that city had about 250 thousand people in it. In other words, you had a high density population exposed. When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation. Then, what happened is like an earthquake. The blast knocked down houses, hibachis had turned over and started fires. When you have an earthquake or an atomic bomb, you start fires and then people are trapped in the buildings. And again, by endless interviews, “Where were you?” “Where was your great uncle?” “Where was grandma when this occurred?” We built up the evidence to show on a cookie-cutter basis that it took about thirty-six hours for about two-thirds of that town to burn.

You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent. They’re talking about after that, “One bomb and away goes Chicago,” you know? All you’ve got to do is look in Life magazine and whatnot back in ’45, ’46, and so on. What I’m trying to do is to show how it’s like “End the war with one B-17.” Well, you have to keep your feet on the ground. As near as we could figure then, about twenty-one thousand people died in thirty-six hours as a result of being trapped and burned and so on. It’s like those who died in the ’23 earthquake [and subsequent] fire. Then, as I say, I set the six months’ deadline for anybody who had been there, even though they went away and so on, to put a deadline on deaths from delayed radiation effects.

One of us got a priest there to say he guessed 100 thousand people died when the bomb went off. Well, you see, it didn’t. There never was 100 thousand people [who] died. When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing! And [they were] comparing it – saying it was the greatest killer in comparing it to the number of deaths in Tokyo, which had been literally destroyed by high explosives. Actually, the atomic bomb was a damn poor killer in comparison to the exposed population.

I used to tell them back in the general staff and including the chief of staff, “If you can deter a war, for God’s sake, let’s do it and blow up the effects all you want. But don’t believe your own propaganda if you are applying it to your military planning.” Actually, the atomic bomb was a poor killer.

(...)

No Bald Spot

Apart from any other nitpicking and anomaly chasing, the key deal breaker for the orthodox story of atomic Hiroshima is the fact that there was no ‘bald spot’. The damage was uniform to the perimeters, exactly as in a typical firebombing raid.

What do I mean by a bald spot? When massive firepower is centered on a main central area, I want to see a serious, concentric glass parking lot (in case of nuke, glowing green). I want to see a focus area melted to sludge and slag at ground zero (immediately below air zero).

(...)

Trickery is the Way of War

Un-Damaged or Pre-Damaged?

Now we need to back up and look at what probably really happened. To do that, we need to first consider the whole target selection thing. It’s well known that certain areas were off limits to everybody. Both LeMay’s firebombing raids and the upcoming possible nuclear attacks were prohibited for Kyoto and the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. There’s a whole huge history on the Kyoto thing and Secretary of War Stimson’s top-down imposition of hands-off that ancient cultural city. I’m not going to go over all that. I’ll just accept for purposes of this discussion that Kyoto was sidelined from the start. Likewise, there were strategic and political issues in deciding whether to target the Imperial Palace that I won’t get into.

By early-to-mid 1945, what did that leave? In the documentary movie The Fog of War, a list of 67 Japanese cities that were, on average, 50% destroyed (usually a lot more) is scrolled out, with the percentage destruction figure for each.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were excluded from that list (in the documentary’s otherwise unrelated storyline), obviously understood as special cases. Those two were especially useful cases – but not perhaps in the way usually thought.

Up to late spring of 1945, the United States strategic bombing and carrier forces had already engaged in continuous attacks of relentless ferocity against the 67 cities – many of which were of far lesser size and military significance than Hiroshima. Here is the attitude of the field commanders up to the end of Spring 1945 and probably much later:

[The] Joint Staff [reported] in April 1945 that our course should be:

Apply full and unremitting pressure against Japan by strategic bombing and carrier raids in order to reduce war-making capability and to demoralize the country in preparation for invasion (‘Now It Can be Told’ Leslie Groves) No mention whatsoever of an amazing new super weapon. The field commanders had no real awareness of the progress of the atomic bomb project, no conception of its potential strategic utility and no plan for its incorporation in real war fighting. They focused entirely on their vision of “no stone left atop another”. Given that by April 1945, they had bombed out over 60% of numerous relatively minor strategic sites (the 67 mentioned above), is it likely that Hiroshima had truly been left pristine? It comes down to a question of military value: did Hiroshima have any?

Hiroshima [was] a major port of embarkation for the Japanese Army and a convoy assembly point for their Navy. The city, in which the local Army headquarters, with some twenty-five thousand troops, was situated, was mainly concentrated on four islands. The railway yards, Army storage depots and port of embarkation lay along the eastern side of the city. A number of heavy industrial facilities were adjacent to the main metropolitan area.
(Leslie Groves)

Hmm. Keep in mind that up to early summer of 1945, there was no atomic target list of ‘reserved cities’. (...)

So now finally, no earlier than May 1945, we get the first order to the field concerning what was to be ‘reserved’ and ‘protected’. It’s most likely that Hiroshima (and Nagasaki as we’ll see) was not chosen as an A-bomb because it was ‘un-damaged’ – rather, it was chosen because it was ‘pre-damaged – in just the right way to serve as the movie set for an atomic attack of the type that had been advertised to the brass as the Manhattan Project payday.

Reconnaissance revealed to the Committee that Hiroshima had been pre-pounded in such a way that the destruction could, with perhaps a pre-dawn finalizing raid and some dog-and-pony psyop work, be represented as a city that had gone from fully populated, undamaged normal functioning to a total moonscape in less than 60 seconds. It was apparently the best choice among the 67 pre-damaged alternatives they must have considered. After the war, the records would have been scrubbed to make it appear that Hiroshima had, by some kind of telepathic precognition, been mysteriously spared or ‘pre-reserved’ – throughout half of 1943, all of 1944, and half of 1945 - by the otherwise incessantly bloodthirsty and hyper-active United States strategic bombing command. (...)

So, to summarize the Hiroshima operation, here’s what likely went down.

It appears that anywhere from 250 to 1000 B-29’s (exact count uncertain, depending on how much of a touch-up and light-show was needed) hit Hiroshima-area targets, including the city itself, on the night and early morning of August 5 and 6. Those attacks were the usual mix of incendiary and high explosives, blasting stuff to ruins and triggering the firestorm. Standard procedure. Probably Hiroshima proper, central districts, was hit last, to coincide closely with that morning’s arrival of the Enola Gay. 

I am assuming the Enola Gay probably did really put in an appearance over the city, for the sake of the flight logs, posterity, history, or Hollywood. They probably released some kind of ‘pumpkin’ device (practice atomic bomb shell) that was rigged for a big flash and dispersal of radiation (thus becoming the second dirty bomb in history, after the Trinity 100-Ton test).

My estimate of the number of planes required, a few hundred at most, is based both on the recorded number of active flights in the time window (as we’ve seen) and also on the Survey’s estimate of what would have been needed. Note however, that a lot of the damage was probably inflicted over the preceding several months.

On the basis of the known destructiveness of various bombs computed from the war in Europe and the Pacific and from tests, the Survey has estimated the striking force that would have been necessary to achieve the same destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To cause physical damage equivalent to that caused by the atomic bombs, approximately 1,300 tons of bombs (one-fourth high explosives and three-fourth incendiary) would have been required at Nagasaki--in the target area. To place that many bombs in the target area, assuming daylight attacks under essentially the same conditions of weather and enemy opposition that prevailed when the atomic bombs were dropped, it is estimated that 1,600 tons of bombs would have had to be dropped at Hiroshima and 900 tons at Nagasaki. To these bomb loads would have to be added a number of tons of antipersonnel fragmentation bombs to inflict comparable casualties. These would add about 500 tons at Hiroshima and 300 tons at Nagasaki. The total bomb loads would thus be 2,100 tons at Hiroshima (400 HE, 1,200 IB) and 1,200 tons (675 HE, 225 IB) at Nagasaki. With each plane carrying 10 tons, the attacking force required would have been 210 B-29s at Hiroshima and 120 B-29s at Nagasaki.
(U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)

In the context of 1945 Japan strategic operations, the resource requirement for these operations is absolutely trivial. After the war, Curtis LeMay said that in the new era of the A-bomb: “one airplane does the work of hundreds”. But as with any mathematical equation, it can also be reversed as needed for special operations: “Hundreds do the work of one.”

Radiation

To those on the wrong end of the gun, ‘dirty bomb’ radioactive materials dispersal is not the same thing as direct exposure to atomic radiation effects. By my FAIL hypothesis, there shouldn’t have been any so-called ‘prompt’ radiation effects from the Little Boy attack. There should be only dirty bomb types of contamination (and not a whole lot of that). Therefore, the acute radiation sickness reports must have been either misunderstood burn effects, or plain over-reporting, exaggeration and fakery. It’s possible the dispersed radioactive material from Enola Gay did have an effect on some people’s health, but that was not likely to have been as intense or immediate as later reported. Dirty bombs just aren’t that dangerous, it’s more of a psy-op concept.

Even if a real ‘Little Boy’ had detonated, even if everything had been strictly-to-spec by the conventional book, we should remember that the blast height and other aspects of the plan were, according to Leslie Groves, designed to minimize radiation effects. Even the humid air of the Japanese summer would have militated against the extreme radiation effects that were later reported. So at a minimum there must have been exaggeration of at least that aspect of the bomb effects. Please don’t think I’m callous about any of this. My breezy tone just soothes the horror of having to write about such things at all. If even one person was hurt in any of this, whether s/he was carbonized, vaporized, barbecued or liquefied, that’s one too many.

(...)

So, vicious as the city bombing campaign undeniably was, it was more for demoralization and punishment than for practical military neutralization. The psy-op aspect of the war persisted into the final nuclear phase as well, with both sides having very strong reasons to buy heavily into the fakeout. Japan had lost the game long before, but as we say: 騎虎の勢い (it’s hard to dismount a tiger).
Given the situation, the atomic story was an absolute godsend.

Though in the United States the story is bomb-centric, in fact the Supreme Council (wartime leadership) did not rush to meet immediately following the news of the Hiroshima bombing. A crisis-mode full meeting was convened on August 9th – but that was several days after Hiroshima. Thus Hiroshima did not seem to light a fire under anybody. After all, they’d had 67 cities trashed already and nobody had been pushed to talk seriously about surrender. And neither was Nagasaki the catalyst for this extraordinary gathering. The Supreme Council meeting had been convened that morning before Nagasaki was hit.

At 11:30 A.M., while the Big Six [leaders] were engaged in a heated debate on what to do about the Potsdam terms, news of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki was relayed to the Supreme War Council. The Nagasaki bomb, however, had little impact on the substance of the discussion. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: “There is no record in other materials that treated the effect [of the Nagasaki bomb] seriously.” Describing the Big Six meeting on this crucial day, neither Togo nor Toyoda mentioned anything about the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
(‘Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan’ Tsuyoshi Hasegawa)

Therefore, neither atomic bombing was the event that really spooked the leadership into considering surrender. So what was the urgency? It was this:

At 11pm Trans-Baikal time on August 8, 1945, Soviet foreign minister Molotov informed Japanese ambassador Satō that the Soviet Union had declared war on the Empire of Japan, and that from August 9 the Soviet Government would consider itself to be at war with Japan.[11] At one minute past midnight Trans-Baikal time on August 9, 1945, the Soviets commenced their invasion simultaneously on three fronts to the east, west and north of Manchuria.
(Wikipedia)

Japan’s leaders knew they were in no position to fight a two front war. They understood the immediate proximity and strength of the Russian forces. It was obvious to them that Japan would be invaded and end up partitioned at best, or entirely occupied by the Soviets at worst. This would have intolerable consequences on both the practical and ideological levels. Under the Soviets, there would be little chance of retaining the status of the Emperor, or any semblance of traditional life. The wartime leaders would be blamed for prodding the nation forward to absolute ruin and all would be summarily executed – including the entire Imperial Family (remember the Romanov family).

Soviet attack, not the Hiroshima bomb, convinced political leaders to end the war by accepting the Potsdam Declaration.
(‘Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan’ Tsuyoshi Hasegawa)

The war was a complete failure. The glorious Empire of the Sun lay in smoking ruins – ‘not one stone atop another’. Meanwhile the leadership had been feeding the people bullshit all along about how there was still hope, and glorious victories still lay ahead. The concept of ‘face’ (honor, reputation, shame) is big in Japan. It would be humiliating and dangerous to admit openly that it was time to surrender because we, your divinely infallible leaders, seriously screwed things up by ever starting this in the first place.

But a science fiction weapon, that nobody could withstand, that no strategic genius could have possibly predicted, the very wrath of heaven descending from out of nowhere like a thunderbolt – there’s an ideal made-in-Hollywood escape hatch and cover story. 

Attributing the sudden about-face toward surrender to the A-bomb would also generate sympathy for Japan as a victim of demonic forces rather than a cruel imperialist hegemon, and would also curry favor with American vanity (not to mention the USA’s post war international PR plans).

Accepting and centralizing the bomb’s role as the trigger for the end stage served everybody’s interests. And so it came to pass.

Akio Nakatani

Death Object Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax