| Thursday,
November 21, 2002 Did
Marc even read the article? That book Bild is
serializing appears to be more of the German far right's revisionist
history. To quote the Daily Telegraph:
"The serialisation of the book will furnish the
far-Right in Germany with arguments to back its revisionist claims."
Bild itself is well, not obviously what one might
call a paragon of journalistic dignity - the website lead article in the
"news" section is "Sie strippen für 250 Euro"
("They Strip for 250 Euros"). I do recognize that there are
cultural differences in what constitutes news...
Cheers,
Bill Colsher
I certainly didn't read it, and have no time to
do so. One can accuse Churchill of war crimes: indeed, we used to use the
bombing of Rotterdam as an example of a clear violation of the laws of war
until the RAF and USAF began far more extensive bombing of civilian
targets. Targets: houses, schools, hospitals, college dormitories,
Mozart's house in Salzberg, historic buildings, that sort of thing. They
weren't precisely targets but it was known that this kind of collateral
damage would result, which is why until World War II air bombardment of
cities was frowned on by civilized powers.
In Churchill's case the Luftwaffe accidentally
dropped bombs on Coventry and some other civilian areas. Their targets
were legitimate industrial targets, but they dropped their bombs according
to a radio navigation scheme at the intersection of radio beams, and the
Brits had interfered with the signal, producing the unintended by either
side result of damage to a residential neighborhood. Churchill immediately
ordered retaliations with deliberate bombing of civilian areas, Hitler
became furious and ordered more deliberate bombing of residential areas,
and the war escalated, and the "Laws of War" which really were
only a codification of what the Great Powers were doing and what limits
they accepted went onto the scrap heap.
It is certainly the case that we tried German and
Japanese commanders for "war crimes" that could have been proven
against a number of allied commanders, including probably every Russian
officer above the rank of colonel. To argue whether Churchill was a
"war criminal" is futile: after all, after all, far worse things
were done -- the Tokyo fire raids, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki
-- and in the Cold War we adopted MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, which
made utter destruction of the enemy's population one of the war aims.
I do not think we will ever get back to the days
when the peasants in the field and the burghers in the towns neither knew
nor cared when the State was at war.
Subj: WW2 Strategic Bombing
I think the case against Churchill's science
advisor, Lindemann, as a war criminal, is stronger than the case against
Churchill himself.
C.P. Snow's _Science_and_Government_ tells the
fascinating stories of (a) the development, before the war -- over
Lindemann's objections! -- of the Chain Home radar system, its deployment
and the development of methods for using it effectively in combat, and
then (b) the adoption, during the war, of the targeting doctrine for
strategic bombing that specifically attempted the destruction of German
industrial workers' residential areas, rather than of factories, based on
a manifestly incompetent analysis by Lindemann. (The analysis assumed such
things as, that multiplying by forty the tonnage of bombs dropped on a
town would multiply by forty the number of people made homeless.)
Alas, it seems to be no longer in print, but used
copies do seem available.
Beware: in the search for used copies I did on
barnesandnoble.com it appeared that most of the first-listed copies were
of the original 1960 lectures, which cover only the radar story. The
strategic bombing story is told in the Appendix, which appears only in
later editions.
Rod Montgomery == monty@sprintmail.com
Yes, I have read that, although I think I no
longer have a copy. And I agree. And see below.
===================
In Mr. Cohen's letter, he
states: "The notion that a non surface, near proximity detonation of
a nuclear device would simply 'be absorbed' is nonsense."
This is not entirely true, as a significant fraction
of asteroids are of the "pile of rubble" type, and and forces
will be absorbed by deformation of the rubble pile , subsequently turning
into heat, and through changing the asteroid's angular momentum (it will
change the way the rock tumbles).
The flash effect he describes will only work if the
exploding regolith/vapor is strong enough for the ejecta to escape the
asteroids (small but hardly insignificant) gravitational pull. Combining
this with the fact that the pattern of the exploding regolith would be
hemispherical (sort of), the "push" from an over-the-surface
nuke would be extremely small. All nukes will have to be extremely precise
in their detonation, or else their cumulative effect will be even smaller
from random vector cancellation...
Mind you, I'm not running calculations here; rather,
I'm just shaving the problem with Occam's Razor, so I'll jump up and down
with unmitigated joy, if I'm proven to be flawed in my reasoning! :D
On the plus side, just today I've read that the
impact probabilities for all disastrous impacts have been scaled down;
with the 200-300 year events "rescheduled" to 1,000 years, and
half-mile or greater objects projected to happen on the order of 700,000
years. I guess I can put up my high-tensile steel umbrella now...
David Bierbaum
Well, mostly I want to keep people aware of
things; I admit to not making the calculations myself, but I have seen
several serious studies of deflecting incoming asteroids. The coupling
between the weapon and the target needs careful attention, but it's a
known and more or less solved problem. I agree you need to have
considerable precision in where you detonate the weapon.
====
We have several from Roland:
Subject: Repent, for the end is nigh.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,70992,00.html
-- ---------------------- Roland Dobbins
Aargh.
Subject: Back up your life.
Back up your life.
http://www.newscientist.com/
news/news.jsp?id=ns99993084 -- ---------------------------
Roland Dobbins
See also my "Integrals of Immortality"
comments on Freeman Dyson's lectures some 15 years ago...
Subject: Let there be life.
Let there be life.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A17496-2002Nov20.html
---------------------- Roland Dobbins
Can they do it on horseback while playing two
trombones?
Subject: Hyenas.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/
scitech/DyeHard/dyehard.html
----------------------------- Roland Dobbins
I need to think on this one. I have a cocktail
party theory that human evolution has been profoundly influenced by the
domestication of dogs: that the god/human symbiosis was in large part
responsible for our being intelligent. This is an interesting
addition...
Siberian Huskies only bark when they think they
need backup. I expect they'd bark at those...
Now for something computer related:
Subject: What I've been saying all along.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28226.html
-------- Roland Dobbins
Indeed you have.
=================
Dear Mr. Pournelle, Your
response to the effects of microwaving power from the
moon to the Earth are spot on. There is one more reason why it would
not be harmful. Microwave is a generic term for a wide range of
frequencies, not all of which are strongly absorbed by water. Clearly, if
we beam micorwave power to the Earth from space, we will choose a
frequency that is not absorbed by water so that the system will work even
on cloudy or rainy days.
Sincerely, Larry Weinstein
-----------------------------------------------------------
Lawrence Weinstein Associate Professor of Physics Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA 23529 757 683 5803 757 683 5809 (fax) weinstei@physics.odu.edu
http://www.physics.odu.edu/~weinstei cumulus-stratus-nimbus (smoke signal)
It turns out that there are costs associated with
using frequencies that go through clouds, or at least they thought so back
in the 70's when I paid real attention to the matter. But the beaming down
of power isn't a big problem. Cheap access to space, of course, is the
long pole in the tent.
We also know how to do that, but we aren't
developing the X projects that would get us cheap access.
Thanks!
And see Phil
Chapman on Solar Power
On Strategic Bombardment:
Dear Dr Pournelle,
Stanley Baldwin - who Churchill detested - was
probably the first man to openly state in Parliament that the
indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations was an inevitable feature
of future war:
"The bomber will always get through. The
only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women
and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. (Hansard,
10 November 1932)"
This was before Guernica drove the point home.
Baldwin of course was well-advised by people who had read Douhet; and the
breaking of the cruiser rules by U-boats in the First World War had taught
him not to put his faith in jurists. (British fears seemed justified by
the, again mistaken, torpedoing of a civilian ship in the channel just
after the war began. Doenitz was hailed up on charges related to
indiscriminate U-boat attacks at Nuremberg, but his lawyer was able to
produce an affidavit signed by Chester B. Nimitz that he had done exactly
the same thing in the Pacific theatre. No one was prepared to call Nimitz
a war criminal on the basis of cruiser rules over a century old).
With respect to anti-Knickebein measures causing
Luftwaffe to bomb Coventry, I had thought this started much earlier. A
comedy of errors began with a few Germans jettisoning their bombs over the
Greater London area. This pre-Knickebein mistake was just the excuse
Churchill needed to sock it to the Nazis. In retaliation the RAF sailed
over Berlin that night, more or less without loss, dropping real bombs
instead of leaflets.
Hitler of course demanded the Luftwaffe return the
favour with interest. Churchill and Sir Keith Park were happy about this:
if the Huns were bombing such militarily insignificant homes, they weren't
bombing the 11 Group airfields. Goering, who should have known better, had
boasted the RAF could never touch German citizens ("Vor allem werde
ich dafur sorgen, dass der Feind keint Bomben werfen Kann." ) and if
they did he was a monkey's uncle ("You may call me Meyer"). At
Nuremberg he ruefully remarked that:
"I believe this plan [raiding RAF
airfields] would have been very successful, but as a result of the
Fuhrer's speech about retribution, in which he asked that London be
attacked immediately, I had to follow the other course. I wanted to attack
the airfields first, thus creating a prerequisite for attacking London . .
. I spoke with the Fuhrer about my plans in order to try to have him agree
I should attack the first ring of RAF airfields around London, but he
insisted he wanted to have London itself attacked for political reasons,
and also for retribution.
I considered the attacks on London useless,
and I told the Fuhrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English
people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their
knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by
such measures but not the British."
My favourite author on intellectual property law -
Anthony D'Amato - has War Crimes as a bit of a hobbyhorse. He defends
Serbians accused of war crimes: check out his page at http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu.
Regards, TC
-- Terry Cole admin@maths.otago.ac.nz System
Administrator Dept. of Maths and Stats, Otago University PO. Box 56,
Dunedin tel:64-3-4797739 NEW ZEALAND fax:64-3-4798427
I thought it was Knickebein but perhaps it was
earlier; I do know that the first bombing of London residences was
accidental, and yes, Churchill was pleased: he could order retaliation,
and then Hitler took the pressure off the radars and Fighter Command by
putting bombers to attacking cities; a futile measure with the iron bombs
of those days.
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