SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“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]: 'I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.'" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX65.html
Lighter-than-air
(LTA) transport opens up fascinating possibilities. Dirigibles can provide heavy cargo lift with
minimal fuel consumption. Flying
cross-country in surprising comfort and at interesting altitudes,
passengers could watch the landscape unfold below at a leisurely pace (say 80
MPH). LTA ships could offload anywhere a modest tower would afford minimal
clearance. Many airports – with their
problems of noise, pollution and real estate wastage – could be
consolidated and removed to distant deserts.
During the Great
Paroxysm, a German Zeppelin flew thousands of miles over enemy territory. Its crewmen intended to bring ten tons of war
supplies to their countrymen marooned in German Central Africa. They never made that delivery. Flying over the North African coast, they
intercepted a bogus radio signal that their troops had surrendered. Fully loaded, the Zeppelin made its way 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
shipping the year prior.
The US Navy
deployed strategic dirigibles equipped with self-docking fighter aircraft. Strategic LTA was abandoned during its
prototype stage, in the 1930’s, just prior to the Greater Paroxysm. American
battleship admirals ordered the world’s finest airships, their advocate
commanders and magnificent crews to fly into hurricanes. Such storms wrecked first-rate warships
belonging to both sides’ Navies, both before and during the Pacific
War. No admiral would have dared
penetrate those storm clouds with their precious airplanes.
Officials of the
British Air Ministry (with visions of Spitfires gleaming in their eyes) did one
better. 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 storm, they publicized the disaster so deafeningly that
the popular outcry allowed them to quietly ground the prototype R100 (a much
better design) and then scrap the entire British dirigible program with hardly
any opposition. Rarely have so few done
so much to harm to so many.
Peace technicians
could find better uses for LTA. The military
liabilities that allowed American admirals and British bureaucrats to cast them
into the trash heap of history, would be largely
irrelevant under peacetime conditions. Modern fabrication and weather forecasting
techniques promise to improve LTA safety; gasbags inflated with fireproof
helium, eliminate hazards posed by explosive hydrogen; lighter materials
and new construction techniques, produce much stronger vessels. The
Hindenburg’s outer covering, for example, was doped with silver-colored paint that
turned out to be high explosive.
Let’s hope we
junk such techno-monstrosities as civilianized strategic bombers,
supersonic ozone depleters and high-altitude main battle tank transports. Multi-hundred-ton aircraft would rake the
skies less often with their contrails of sewage, waste fuel and combustion
by-products. The stratosphere – once upon a time cloudless and now foggy and
seared with surges of ultra-violet – might be allowed to heal. With our skies serene once again, majestic,
helium-filled sky sculptures could make a spectacular comeback.
Another promising
technology is WIG or Wing-in-Ground flying boats. Under the direction of Rostislav Y. Alexeiev and in great secrecy,
the Soviets built one-hundred-plus ton Ekranoplans
that skimmed the surface of the sea.
Relying on surface-effect lift, they could carry enormous payloads
across vast distances. Their
cruising speed ran as high as 500 KPH (300 MPH) at very low altitude (20
meters), in other words, below most radar scans. And
their fuel consumption turned out to be exceptionally low. Once the craft had accelerated to velocities
at which the surface-effect took hold, the drag that slows conventional
aircraft was reduced. This technology
promoted enormous machines, since they got the most benefit from the surface
effect.
As usual, these
craft were first deployed as weapon systems.
Prototypes were designed to deliver ship-killing missiles or a
large number of troops and armored vehicles overseas. Fully amphibious, they could fly across flat
terrain (beaches, deserts and snow/ice fields) as readily as across calm waters
(with less than ten-foot waves). Settled
on the surface of a body of water, they became extremely shallow-draft vessels.
Today, such
transports could carry massive freight payloads or many tourists. The idealist Alexeiev intended his Ekranoplans to fulfill just such a
peaceful task in the first place.
Getting 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
own 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 lighter launch vehicle. Post-launch direction-finding has already
been perfected with cruise missiles and fighter ejection seats. Rockets
launched from dirigible platforms would be cheaper, safer and more ecologically
sound than payloads hurled from sea level by the brute force of explosive
chemicals.
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 the
weapon 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 removes. Giant
balloons just won’t fit the bill. So
much the better…
Nowadays, 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 to its
unique internal layout. You can find
them at http://www.ohio-airships.com/OhioAirships/.
I hope Learners’ enthusiastic endorsement does not jeopardize their
marketing plans.
While lofting
low-orbit space payloads would be within the Dynalifter’s capabilities (and many other valuable civilian
applications—think of loitering search-and-rescue and scientific research
craft), this project is proposed primarily as a long-endurance platform
for weapons, strategic transport and surveillance. Why am I not surprised?
Just as LTA has
nothing but peace technology potential in the long run, so nuclear and ‘hot’
fusion power plants have no legitimate function here and now. Nuclear power may perhaps serve a moon-based
industrial plant, but none here on Earth.
The problem with nuclear energy is its universal appeal as a self-reinforcing weapon system and its zero potential as a viable peace technology. Face it. Whether by abrupt accident or long-term contamination, nuclear reactors vomit torrents of radioactivity across entire continents. Building a ‘safe’ nuclear reactor is like designing a theft-proof bank or an unsinkable ship―good luck trying.
Our bodies have
adapted to millions of years of constant background radiation. During the last fifty years, this background
count has tripled (quadrupled, now, with Fukushima) due to clumsy accidents,
mismanaged pollution and criminal experiments.
In addition, the thinned-out ozone layer intensifies an
electromagnetic blizzard that our bodies, raised under pure Serengeti skies,
were never intended to handle. The human body is a raw-nerve recording
instrument: a gyroscope, chronometer, oscilloscope, barometer, scintillation
counter, gravity meter and multi-band antenna of unmatched delicacy. Who knows what effects this multi-generation
bombardment may cause?
As far back as
the Joint Atomic Bomb Commission of 1945, both Dr.
Averill A. Liebow, the chairman of that official body, and Dr. Alice Stewart, it’s most vocal
dissident, protested that long-term, low-level radiation could be just as
harmful to humans as shorter, more intense bursts of radioactivity.
The ideal resting place for radioactive isotopes is in the stable ore seams where they were first dug up. This sure beats lacing the air and water with them, and lodging them in baby fat at the top of the food chain. We can only hope this idea sinks in permanently and that pitchblende mining tails off. Current nuclear policy is suicide by slow poisoning.
As far as nuclear technologies are concerned, Thorium nuclear power plants may offer a preferable alternative. They hold significant advantages over their Uranium238 equivalents.
Thorium ores are available in quantities much greater than Uranium reserves soon to run out. Secondly, Thorium232 reactors cannot go critical (unlike so-called pebble bed reactors: a compromise technology part-Thorium and mostly Uranium); they would be a lot cheaper to build and run than those requiring costly safeguards against runaway nuclear reactions. Third, Thorium power plants do not produce weapon-grade material (Uranium235 and Plutonium239) as end products. Finally, the tailings of Thorium reactions have a radioactive half-life of hundreds instead of thousands and millions of years, and are thus easier to store until they are safe.
Uranium238 reactors were favored over Thorium, because they produced weapon-grade materials required for the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons humanity saw fit to build. Thorium reactor research reached the stage of building working models, but were sidelined in favor of Uranium ones; just like solar, water and wind power were sidelined in favor of nuclear, coal and petroleum equivalents. It’s about time to abandon insane weapon energy technologies in favor of rational peace ones.
The main problem with “hot” fusion power, of course, is
the county-sized crater it could excavate once it went critical and out of
control. Bets, anyone?
In the meantime,
we should improve global energy efficiencies, energy conservation and ‘soft’
power sources, (especially wind, tide and solar power). Windmills should carpet high-wind corridors
and low-impact hydropower plants should dot every adaptable
waterway.
Overcapitalized
nuke and oil interests (weapon technicians on the march!) have quashed these
obvious alternatives for decades. Then
they’ve carefully subsidized their own nightmare technologies. Big surprise!
During the Greater Paroxysm, multinational fascists hatched a plot to kill off entire peoples whose birth certificates they considered improperly filled out. They executed their scheme with little interference from the Allies who never bombed the death camps and their train depots, even though the rest of Europe was flattened nearly targetless. It would be interesting to list the few strategic factories that were spared this near-universal fate in Germany and elsewhere, and their international owners.
Meanwhile, human
prey were entrained to death camps by the millions. There, large concrete bunkers were filled
with victims and then with poison gas. With
furious efficiency, the end products were shoveled into crematoria, and the
victims’ belongings were recycled to finance the Nazi war effort (the dawn of
recycling).
These
all-too-human fascists discovered, however, that they could never make their
death camps efficient enough. For
some reason, more victims always emerged than the technical means to dispose of
them. There were never enough sociopaths
available to guard and process them while they were being exterminated. So discouraging.
Nowadays, these
same brutes have arranged things so that they and their cronies will
occupy large concrete underground bunkers crammed with luxury tidbits and
survival necessities. Instead of poison
gas, they will breathe the purest air modern technology can filter. Once
everything is stylishly perfected, they plan to flood the
planet-turned-crematorium with a half-century’s output of the most expensive
omnicide toxins they could persuade their panicked victims/constituents to
bankroll. All those loathsome Others may
die en
masse on a planet turned
into Belsen—much more efficiently this time.
There has been a
lot of empty talk about new world orders, and repeated flourishes of treaty
ceremonial … more diplomacy down the drain.
And there have been quite a few mass protests against nukes; global
movements have come and gone virtually overnight, condemning this ugly
business. Yet nothing serious has ever been done to avert this truly Final
Solution. (“This time, we really mean
it!”).
Here is another
Learner obligation: cripple these satanic ministries and drive their minions
into well-deserved if involuntary retirement.
The threat of
military omnicide swells every time another power group comes online with
nuclear, chemical, biological and meteorological weaponry. Every
time another test nuke explodes, a sleeping Devil blinks.
It is only with our mindless consent that such lunatics could turn this planet into Belsen or threaten us with doing so. We must have been sleepwalking to entrust our destiny to such ghouls. I would have preferred that no such Damocles' sword hung over our heads, dangling from a hopeless jumble of military metaphors―no man-made, man-worshipped apocalypse software and none of that trillion-dollar serpentine of genocide hardware perfectly coiled to strike.
I would have been far happier with a less watertight
corroboration of my thesis: that we are weapon zombies hypnotized by weapon
mentality, sleepwalking hand-in-hand into Armageddon. Our
blind submission to this nuclear nightmare confirms the deathlike grip that weapon
mentality holds over our collective superconscience.
It’s up to
us to liberate ourselves; which means it is up to you. Yes, friend Learner, no one but you!
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld