- PLUS LTA, MINUS NUKES -

Alternative transportation hardware. The formal interdiction of nuclear war.

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Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- PLUS LTA, MINUS NUKES -

“The test, code-named ‘Trinity,’ took place on July 16 [1945]. It exploded with a force equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT. Recalling the scene, Oppenheimer said: "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty [author’s note: and cheerfully kill his relatives in battle]: 'Now I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.'"           http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX65.html

 LTA, Lighter-than-air transport, offers fascinating possibilities. Dirigibles can provide heavy cargo lift with low fuel consumption. Passengers could fly cross-country in surprising comfort and watch the landscape unfold at a leisurely pace (say 80 MPH) and an interesting altitude. LTA ships could offload anywhere a modest tower affords minimal clearance. Many airports – with their problems of noise, air pollution and waste of costly real estate – could be consolidated and shifted to distant wastelands.

During the Great Paroxysm, a German Zeppelin overflew thousands of miles of enemy territory. Its crewmen intended to deliver ten tons of war supplies to countrymen marooned in German Central Africa. They never made delivery. Flying across the North African coast, they intercepted a bogus radio broadcast that their troops had surrendered. Fully loaded, they flew back to Central Europe non-stop. 

LTA is a glass-jawed technology : it presents a large, slow and unarmored target to ground fire, fighter interception, sabotage and bad weather. Its only practical weapons application was escorting American coastal convoys against Nazi submarines. No dirigible-escorted convoy lost a ship during the war, despite the massacre of unescorted coastal ships the year prior. 

The US Navy developed strategic dirigibles equipped with self-docking fighter aircraft. They were abandoned during their prototype stage in the 1930s, just prior to the Greater Paroxysm. American battleship admirals ordered the world’s finest airships, their advocate commanders and crack crews to fly into hurricanes. Storms of this kind wrecked first-class warships from both navies before and during the Pacific War. Those admirals would have dared penetrate such thunderheads with their precious airplanes.

Officials of the British Air Ministry (with visions of Spitfires gleaming in their eyes) got away with something even worse. They dispatched the dirigible R101 to India even though it was so poorly designed it could barely lift its own weight. After its inevitable crash in a thunderstorm, they publicized the disaster so loudly that the popular outcry let them ground the prototype R100 (a much sounder design) and quietly scrap the entire British dirigible program with no opposition. Rarely have so few done so much to harm to so many.

Peace technicians will find better uses for LTA. The military liabilities that allowed bureaucrats to trash them will be largely irrelevant on PeaceWorld. Modern fabrication and weather forecasting techniques promise to improve LTA safety; gasbags, inflated with fireproof helium, eliminate hazards posed by explosive hydrogen; stronger materials and new construction techniques will produce lighter and stronger vessels. The outer covering of the Hindenburg airship, for example, was doped with a silvery, high-explosive paint. 

Let’s hope these techno-monstrosities will be junked : civilianized strategic bombers, supersonic ozone depleters and high-altitude transports of main battle tanks. Hundred-ton aircraft will rake the skies less often with their contrails of sewage, waste fuel and combustion by-products. The stratosphere – once cloudless and now foggy and seared with ultra-violet – may heal once again. Majestic, helium-filled sky sculptures can make a spectacular comeback as the sky resumes its serenity.

Another promising technology is WIG or Wing-in-Ground flying boats. In great secrecy under the direction of Rostislav Y. Alexeiev, the Soviets built one-hundred-plus-ton Ekranoplans that skimmed the surface of the sea. Relying on the lift produced by the surface effect, they carried heavy payloads across vast distances. Their cruising speed ran as high as 500 KPH (300 MPH) at very low altitude (under 20 meters or sixty+ feet), in other words below most radars. Their fuel consumption was exceptionally low. Once these craft speed up to the point at which the surface-effect takes effect, the drag that slows conventional aircraft is reduced. This technology promotes big machines since they benefit the most from the surface effect.

As usual, these craft were first deployed as weapon systems. Prototypes delivered a large number of troops with their light tanks overseas; later on, heavy anti-ship missiles. Fully amphibious, they could fly across flat terrain (beaches, deserts and snow/ice fields) as readily as across calm seas with ten-foot or lower waves. Settled on bodies of water, they turned into extremely shallow-draft vessels.

Nowadays, such transports could carry massive freight payloads or many tourists. The idealist Alexeiev intended his Ekranoplans to fly peacefully up and down Russian rivers in the first place.

Going back to lighter-than-air craft, they could also serve as first stage boosters for space payloads. Large dirigibles could lift heavy space vehicles into the stratosphere and release them to fire up their rockets at thirty thousand feet. Basically, we would replace the giant, first-stage rocket packs we're used to, with a little more payload in a much lighter launch vehicle. Cruise missiles and fighter ejection seats have already perfected post-launch direction finding. Rockets launched in this way from dirigible lifters would be cheaper, safer and more ecologically sound than payloads hurled from the Earth’s surface with brute chemical explosives. If you did it right, you could reuse the lifter with new payloads.

I am grateful to Doug Dean for this idea — among many we shared before his regretted demise. 

This technology was never adopted. The basic goal of WeaponWorld space programs is to loft nuclear missiles from concrete silos at an instant’s notice, and incinerate vast cities or smack pinpoint targets like enemy missile silos at intercontinental distances. Giant balloons just won’t fill the bill. So much the better…

Dr. Daniel P. Raymer, President of the Conceptual Research Corporation, is the lead designer of the Dynalifter concept, a hybrid winged dynamic lifter and helium airship “successfully combining the loitering capabilities of airships with the ground handling of fixed-wing aircraft.” The Ohio Airships Company owns the conceptual design and patent rights for its unique internal layout. You can find them at http://www.ohio-airships.com/OhioAirships/.

There is as well a French company, Voliris, http://www.latribune.fr/green-business/l-actualite/20120510trib000697948/bientot-des-dirigeables-pour-le-transport-de-fret-.html. Also the California-based Worldwide Aeros Corp. whose airships can carry 66 tons of cargo 4,380 miles non-stop at up to 140 miles per hour, with much lower gas consumption compared to equivalent cargo planes.

While lofting stratospheric space payloads would be within the Dynalifter’s capabilities (along with other priceless civilian applications — think of long-endurance search-and-rescue and scientific research craft), this project was first proposed as a loitering platform for weapons delivery, strategic transport and surveillance. Why am I not surprised?

Just as LTA offers nothing but peace potential in the long run, nuclear and “hot” fusion power plants offer no legitimate function in the here and now. Nuclear power may serve a moon-based industrial plant, but none here on Earth. The problem with nuclear energy is its appeal as a self-reinforcing weapon system and zero potential as a peace technology. 

Face it. Whether by abrupt accident or long-term contamination, nuclear reactors vomit torrents of radioactivity across the ocean (Fukushima) or a continent (Chernobyl). Building a “safe” nuclear reactor is like designing a theft-proof bank or an unsinkable ship ― good luck with that!

Our bodies adapted to millions of years of constant background radiation. During the last fifty, that background count has tripled (sextupled now, with Chernobyl and Fukushima?) due to accidents, runaway pollution and criminal military experiments. In addition, the thinning ozone layer has intensified an electromagnetic blizzard that our bodies ‒ raised under the vast, pure skies of the Serengeti ‒ could never handle. The human body is a raw-nerve recording machine: a thermometer, gyroscope, chronometer, oscilloscope, barometer, scintillation counter, gravity meter and multi-band antenna of unmatched delicacy. Who knows what effects this multi-generation bombardment will impose on generations to come? Do our epidemics of auto-immune disease (cancer, obesity, diabetes, arthritis, depression, autism, dementia, etc.) arise from it unacknowledged?

During the Joint Atomic Bomb Commission of 1945, both Dr. Averill A. Liebow, the chairman of that official body and it’s most vocal dissident, Dr. Alice Stewart asserted that long-term, low-level radiation could do as much harm to human beings as short bursts of intense radioactivity. Dead silence on this topic since.

The ideal resting place for this kind of isotope is buried in stable ore seams from which they were first dug up. That would sure beat lacing the air and water with them and lodging them in human baby fat at the tip-top of the food chain. We can only hope that idea sinks in and pitchblende mining is curtailed. Current nuclear diktats are suicide by slow poisoning. 

When it comes to nuclear technology, Thorium nuclear power plants offer better alternatives than Uranium238 equivalents. Much greater quantities of Thorium is available than Uranium reserves that will run out soon. A great source of Thorium? Coal tailing piles.

Secondly, Thorium232 reactors do not go critical (unlike so-called pebble bed reactors: a compromise technology part-Thorium and mostly Uranium). They use molten Thorium both as a heat source and a cooling fluid; it is a very hot and corrosive fluid, but operates at sea level atmospheric pressure. This differs from water-cooled Uranium power, whose materials must be kept separate. If the piping of a Thorium reactor bursts, its circulating liquid falls into a capture vat and that stops the reaction cold. Uranium reactors require costly and unrealistic safeguards against critical reaction. When those go haywire, high-pressure, super-heated steam explodes, followed by subsequent binary explosions of free oxygen and hydrogen (rocket fuel) that throw off uncontainable clouds and shrapnel, both highly radioactive.

We could build modular Thorium reactors on the cheap.

Finally, the leftovers of Thorium reactions have a radioactive half-life of hundreds of years instead of millions, and are thus easier to store, even though they may be hotter in the meantime, until they are safe to bury conventionally.

Thorium reactors produce Uranium233 that can be used to make atomic weapons after elaborate industrial processing. That passport to disaster will have to be watched very carefully.

Thorium reactors reached the experimental stage in the 1960s, but was sidelined in favor of Uranium ones. In the same stupid way, solar, water and wind power were sidelined in favor of nuclear, coal and petroleum equivalents. We should abandon those insane weapon technologies in favor of more rational peace alternatives. India, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia and China have gone ahead in developing this new technology, compared to techno retardation for profit in America and the rest of Europe.

The main problem with a “hot” fusion power source is, of course, the county-sized crater it could gouge out once it went critical. Bets, anyone? Besides, this technology has been declared “possible within the next fifteen years” for the past 75 years and still today with no end in sight.

In the meantime, we should upgrade global energy efficiencies, conservation and “soft” sources. Windmills should carpet high-wind corridors and low-impact hydropower plants should dot every receptive waterway. Advanced smart energy management systems should have been installed decades ago and are still non-existent. Cheap capitalist frauds!

For generations, overcapitalized nuke and fossil fuel interests (weapon technicians on the march!) have quashed these obvious alternatives. Instead, they’ve carefully subsidized their own nightmare technologies. What a big surprise!

During the Greater Paroxysm, multinational fascists hatched a plot to kill off entire peoples whose birth certificate they deemed poorly filled out. Their scheme went ahead with little interference from the Allies who never bombed the death camps and their train depots, even though the rest of Europe was bombed flat. It would be interesting to list the few strategic factories spared this fate in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, as well as their international owners. 

Meanwhile, millions of human prey were entrained to death camps. There, concrete bunkers were filled with victims and poison gas. With Teutonic efficiency, the end products were shoveled into crematoria and the victims’ belongings, recycled to finance the Nazi war effort. The dawn of industrial recycling! 

These all-too-human fascists discovered, however, that they could never make their death camps efficient enough. More victims always emerged than the technical means to dispose of them. There were never enough sociopaths to guard them while the extermination went on. So discouraging!

Nowadays, the ideological descendants of these brutes have arranged things so that they will occupy underground cities crammed with luxury tidbits and survival necessities. Instead of poison gas, they will breathe the purest, freshest air modern agro-technology can filter. Once everything has been perfected to their taste, they plan to flood the planet-turned-crematorium with a century’s output of the most expensive omnicide toxins they could persuade their panicked victims/constituents to bankroll. We despised Others can die en masse on a planet turned into Belsen — much more efficiently this time. 

We’ve heard a lot of empty talk about new world orders and repeated flourishes of treaty ceremonial … more empty diplomacy flushed down the drain. Quite a few mass protest movements have sprung up overnight against nuclear weapons and evaporated just as quickly. Yet nothing serious has been done to avert this truly Final Solution. (“This time, we really mean it!”). 

Other Learner objectives: cripple these satanic ministries and drive their minions into well-deserved if involuntary retirement. 

The threat of military omnicide grows worse every time another power group comes online with nuclear, chemical, biological and meteorological weaponry. Every time another nuclear test explodes, a somnolent Devil blinks. 

Such lunatics could never turn this planet into Belsen or threaten to do so without our brainless consent. We must have been sleepwalking to entrust our fate to such ghouls. I would rather no such Damocles' sword hung over our heads from a hopeless tangle of military metaphors ― no man-made, man-worshipped, man-promised apocalypse and no multi-trillion-dollar serpentine of genocidal hardware perfectly coiled above our head to strike. 

A less watertight confirmation of my thesis would have sufficed: that we are weapon zombies hypnotized by weapon mentality, sleepwalking hand-in-hand into Armageddon. The death grip weapon mentality holds over our collective conscience is confirmed by our blind submission to this nuclear nightmare. 

It’s up to us to free ourselves. Which means it is up to you. 

That’s right, fellow Learner, nobody but you!

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net