Space shuttle Discovery is due to dock with the ISS... [2005]
while snails are returning to Earth at great speed... on a Soyuz spacecraft carrying Russia’s Salizhan Sharipov, US astronaut Leroy Chiao, and Italy’s Robert Vittori...
Strange... I thought (or was it in a dream?) a few days ago about studying snails, but in space? Hey, why not and see which way they curl up or get their foot in a knot while frothing at the mouth...?
This brings me to another one of chapters in modern human history that are very important to me...
These events represent the underlying way we, the general public, live happy as Larry under our beautiful skies, while we have no clue what is happening deep in the corridors of powers, or up there in the battles of space wars, with umbrellas of threats and counterthreats, of deep analysis of these threats and these counter threats, of governmental desires of supremacy and controls...
History provides the trends on which we are moving towards... but we need to know what is on the table... as well as what’s hidden under it.
Humanity on earth is like the magic colours of a soap bubble but like it... it is so fragile...
Unfortunately, we “vote” and live in democracies that cannot afford too many people asking the right questions... or know too much...

THE VAN ALLEN BELTS
I’d like thus to not so much expose, as it is somewhat known, but I’d like to remind those who know and tell those who don’t know, especially our young people about a sorry series of events that happened during the 50s and 60s... and still have massive repercussion today. See in many areas of governmental development, planning often starts 30 years before any headway is achieved in the desired direction. Thus R&D (Research and Development) burns an enormous amount of dollar before bringing returns and all this money comes from our pocket or our kids’ future earning, that we’re spending NOW...
I am referring here to the Van Allen Belts saga... and the nuclear age and tests that followed from that first explosion in the Nevada desert.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are well known, the French atomic tests in Tahiti are well known, the English tests in this country are also well studied but some tests never made it to the front page of the rags of the day.
Even on that first Nevada test, the father of the “bomb”, Robert Oppenheimer was slightly worried the chain reaction would not stop once the nuclear fuel was “spent”although he was 99 per cent sure it would... The calculations proved right otherwise the earth would have become an extra “sun” in our solar system...
A friend of mine asked me about Aurora Borealis a few days ago and I nearly cried... I remembered these many misdemeanours we were doing (and those we are still doing) to our little planet...

What are the Van Allen Belts indeed?
In simple broad terms, it’s a conglomeration of charged particles at about 1000 km above the earth surface (lower in some parts) that are trapped by the earth magnetism and stirred up by solar winds which they deflect... A division occurs between night and day... and since the belts do not exist in the polar regions we get the fantastic glow of the upper layers of the atmosphere being exposed directly to solar winds...
The Van Allen Belts also act as a reflector of radio waves for certain frequencies, mostly in the short band width. It’s not “designed” as such but it’s a very useful natural property and many “Ham” radio operator would know that it works best, if only, during night time...
In the wisdom and madness of the space age race and nuclear supremacy, the USA and the USSR did nuclear tests up there, in mid last century just “to see what would happen...” . In fact it was part of impact studies a nuclear explosion would have on not yet-developed satellites, in the future... as well as other secret agenda, like domination in  space...

Summary notes from the US tests follow thus (similar tests and results from the USSR):
_________________
from astronautix.com
Family: Status USAF X-17
Country: USA.
Sounding Rockets flight test program at Cape Canaveral studied reentry problems by
simulating reentry velocities and conditions with a three-stage solid-fuel Lockheed X-17.
A total of 26 X-17 flights were conducted until March 1957.
1958 Aug 27 -Launch Site USS Norton Sound Launch Complex

1958 Sep 6 — Launch Site USS Norton Sound Launch Complex — Argus 3
Third and final covert Argus launch to study effect of nuclear explosions on the Van
Allen radiation belts. The launch location was 48.5 deg South,9.7 deg West ;altitude
reached 750 km; yield of the nuclear warhead,1.7 kilotons.
1959 - Deputy Secretary of Defense Quarles announced that three blasts were secretly
fired in space (Project Argus) in 1958, using modified X-17 rockets.
_______________________
Gus: I can say here that although there was “minimal” damage to the Belts, one cannot but measure the long term effect of such explosions... The US repeated similar series of tests in 1962... The Russians also conducted similar tests...

The following article from the:
“© British Crown Copyright 2004/MoD. Published with the permission of the controller
of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office” could be bogus but I don’t think so... here it is anyway...
____________________________
Modelling Artificial Van Allen Radiation Belts
Computational Physics Group, Design Physics Department, AWE Aldermaston, Reading,
Berkshire,
RG7 4PR.
Atmospheric detonation of nuclear weapons leaves many nuclides (the weapon debris) in states which decay by emission of -particles and -rays in the MeV energy range. These radionuclides typically decay along a chain of daughter species over a considerable period of time, and so the -particles and -rays are classed as “delayed” radiation.
Delayed radiation resulting from a nuclear burst in the upper atmosphere can pose a serious threat to space-based systems, especially satellites.
Unprotected satellites may be damaged by the impact of energetic -rays, for example, or by the accumulation of charge due to sweeping up both -particles and the electrons that they produce in atmospheric ionisation events.
Modern electronic components can be particularly sensitive, but may be “hardened” in critical systems if deemed necessary. Determination of the -particle flux produced by high altitude detonations is therefore important to satellite design.
A particular problem is the long term persistence of the flux due to charged particle trapping by the geomagnetic field producing artificial radiation belts.
AWE has established a model for calculating the hostile environments presented by geomagnetically
trapped -particles following a high altitude nuclear burst.
In order to build a model of nuclear-induced radiation belts, kinetic theory is used to find the characteristics of the bounce motion back and forth along the field lines and the Eastward (and curvature) drift motion which the
-[negative] particles undergo.
A model for the atmospheric detrapping of -particles is also required. Non-collisional particle diffusion mechanisms can destabilise radiation belt particles in the long term; the experimental results from high altitude nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s cannot be reproduced unless non-collisional effects, such as interactions with electromagnetic waves, are assumed either to move the s across field lines (“L-shells”) or to alter the
altitude at which the particles reflect.
A model, “AIRTIGHT” (Artificially Injected Radiation Trapped In the Geo-H-field Toolkit), has been developed to track motion in reflection point altitude, longitude, energy and L-shell phase space using a simple dipole approximation to the geomagnetic field.

A Monte Carlo approach* is taken, where non-interacting particles are generated from realistic debris distributions. The flux is calculated from these data by use of the analytically determined bounce periods of the particles. Determination of the altitude of the mirror point for each particle becomes an issue, and the atmospheric effect on the pitch angle of the particles has been included. Some sample output from the AIRTIGHT model will be presented, and some broad conclusions on satellite vulnerability drawn.
© British Crown Copyright 2004/MoD. Published with the permission of the controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
_________________
This third article extracted from a feasibility study of the international Space Treaty till 2015...
_________________________
...... HAND* [ High Altitude Nuclear Detonations] can destroy or disrupt LEO [Low Earth Orbit] satellites in two primary ways. First, prompt X-rays can upset or burnout the electronics for the five to ten percent of each LEO constellation within line of sight of the explosion.

219 For HAND more specifically, the United States should begin by continuing its arms control efforts such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) designed to deny potential adversaries the tools necessary to carry out a HAND.
---------------------------------
Back to Gus:
We can see here in item 217-218-219 a complex game of deceit and manipulation in order to control space. In some way we could not agree more at limiting the risks of the nuclear threat but that gives an enormous power to one country alone if we follow the US model alone...
When the article mentions electronics of satellites being at risks because of radiation one has to read as well, and this is firmly stated in Encyclopedia Britannica, that astronauts and cosmonauts are at risk as well at certain distance from earth (in the vicinity of 1000 km... although the decay in space of the -particles and the -radiation was noted to be particularly fast for nuclear decay (scattering ).
Yet it can be said using information from other sources that from these tests that the radio-activity in the Van Allen Belts is about a thousand fold what it was prior to the tests. May be we should worry too much... may be we...

This leads me also to another article recently published in the Sydney Morning Herald:
rediscovering the global nuclear threat... Since the early 60s me and my friends have been on the barricades tooting this problem loud and clear...
Yes, the massive nuclear arsenals of the world are not just idle decorations in someone’s backyard like a bunch of smiling garden gnomes. The weapons are aimed. They are ready to be armed within seconds. They are pointed at someone else... There is a plethora of red buttons...
Nuclear Disarmament was (and I believe still is) a great priority (if not his first) of P J Keating when he was Prime Minister. The first (or second? can someone out there refresh my memory on this chronology...?) lecture of Professor Keating (after he had been voted out of office) at the University of NSW was on this very subject and he painted a bleak picture that could not be anything else but bleak...
All this, despite a “disarmament” treaty being in force... The dismantlement of some of the arsenal does not preclude the secret and even not so secret invention of new ones...
The US are working on the “Son of Star Wars” to which Australia has been committed by J W Howard, the US are developing smaller targetable nuclear device that have “minimal” environmental damage... Neutron bombs are also here and, at the very bottom of this sorry nuclear pile of hardware, we have the depleted uranium shells, used in Gulf War One, in Kosovo and Gulf War Two (more can be said on this subject alone). These shells cannot be classified as Nuclear Devices although they do emit low radio-activity to about 300 times acceptable levels if one is close enough, and much higher once they “vapourise”. They can be and should be classified as primitive “dirty” nuclear bombs...

LINE OF SIGHT
The huge arsenal of the US would be aimed someone... say at China, Russia and a few smaller countries for good measure... The huge Russian arsenal would be pointed at China and the USA, while China’s would point at the other two, principally. The Indian nuclear arsenal is focused on Pakistan while the Pakistani outfit is aimed at India... The Israeli nuclear arsenal would have several direction around that small country, and target Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Iran and a few others. The French arsenal like the English arsenal would be targeted at everybody else...

This seemingly arrested status quo is always in a flux especially when things (like monitoring) can go wrong. A few too many times Russia was on red alert, so were the Yanks... This also is difficult to monitor as a lot of these arsenals are stashed away on nuclear submarines, cruising the world oceans 24-7 (to use this ugly Yankee euphemism meaning 24 hours a day seven days a week...)
Who can forget the missile crisis in the early 1960s. In this saga the tooted hero was President Kennedy... but the real winner was President Kruschev, as he got the US to remove the nuclear devices pointed at Russia from a bit too close in the Turkish region... The most recent known incident in 2005 was when a US memo was badly written and a spelling mistake started a huge nuclear scare... Brother!

LOST IN SMOKE
So we’re marooned between one minute-to-midnight and one second-to-midnight from near-total oblivion on the surface of this planet, at any moment in time.... All we need is an idiot... I hate to be a prophet of gloom and doom but unless we come to our sense urgently and stop to democratically elect waring idiots in charge of our communities we should be able to pull things back a bit and see ourselves grow old... This is why the UN is so important despite its short-comings... It should be encourage to flourish and become a true centre for people of good will... This is why someone like John Bolton should not be contemplated as the US ambassador to the UN.

Hey, it’s quite funny as I was watching the ABC the other night about songs and protests... Here we had a young man fighting the obviously undemocratic behaviour of governments, yet these days these undemocratic behaviour are worse yet we don’t even hear “boo” from the youths we’re stuffing up the future of...  But due to massive deception, our governments hide their undemocratic behaviour, with the help of a media designed to put us to sleep with illusions and dreams of a better diet program... The generation-me (selfish) is winning the day... The be positive is a great seller... It’s like as if it’s un-Australian to bag J W Howard... it’s like as who cares... It’s Hollywood... Ironically, Payback and True Lies.... in the Mel Gibson movie, Payback, Kris Kristofferson plays the worst of baddies while in real life he is at the vanguard of protecting democracy... in the movie True Lies Arnold Swatzernegger plays a savior spy while in real life he adopts pseudo-nazi policies...

ECONOMY?
Yes I could not agree more with John Howard that trade is best to minimise tension between countries and he is not the owner nor the creator of this concept... it’s as old as 40,000 years of aboriginal traditions... The major problem presenting itself in our present situation with “increase trade” is also the increasing expenditure of energy to produce more stuff thus speeding up the global warming...
It’s a catch 22 situation...

What other cock-ups are we planning for the earth beside blowing up bombs in the Van Allen Belts? The accelerated deforestation of the Amazon? Dumping waste in the world oceans? Keep an eye out for the person who has nothing to lose, like the fanatic who profess god-given rights and for the grubby greedy monster who could not care less... keep a watch for the politicians who make promises and then say sorry for breaking them... (J W Howard). The only way out all this is to become more frugal. No other short term practice can help... The Flower people, the hippies of the sixties might prove to be right after all...
But will it be too late?

By Gus Leonisky at 25 Apr 2005 - 11:24am

reinstated on 21 July 2009 - 10:45