Operation Manna (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia)

by James Philip

  6. Within ten seconds the fireball will be over a mile wide and its temperature, although reduced by nearly eighty percent by that stage, is still at least ten to eleven million degrees Celsius.

  7. Anybody within twenty miles who looks into, or was looking in the general direction of the heart of the nuclear fire for a split second will be blinded, and anybody caught in the open within ten miles of the point of ignition will suffer second degree burns to exposed flesh.

  8. For purposes of reference the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima exploded with a force equivalent to approximately 12,500 tons of Trinitrotoluene (TNT), or 0.0125 megatons. A 1 megaton bomb has an explosive power of at least eighty times that of the Hiroshima bomb.[132]

  9. If a 1 megaton bomb explodes on the ground it will excavate a crater over one hundred feet deep and over a thousand feet in diameter. The walls of that crater (which will be lethally irradiated for many years thereafter) will stand up to a hundred feet high above the surrounding terrain, and the rising nuclear ‘mushroom cloud’, heavily laden with highly irradiated soil and pulverised debris will dump massive amounts of radioactive ‘fall out’ perhaps for hundreds of miles downwind.

  10. Paradoxically, a ‘ground burst’ is the less ‘efficient’ and less ‘damaging’ of the two types of nuclear explosion.

  11. An air burst, all things being equal, will be at least twice as destructive as a ground blast and it sucks up significantly less radioactive fallout.

  12. Simply stated; in an air burst the blast overpressure created by the explosion is spread over a much wider area, and it is blast overpressure that is the most immediately destructive component of any explosion of any size.

  13. Blast overpressure is a shock wave travelling at over seven hundred miles an hour. That is, it travels at one mile every five seconds outwards in every direction from the epicentre of the blast.

  14. Two miles away from a one megaton air burst local overpressure is over ten pounds per square inch; every building is destroyed with only the traces of concrete foundations surviving. Within this radius of the explosion almost everybody is killed instantly.

  15. Four miles away, overpressure is 6 pounds per square inch; everything above ground implodes or is blown away except the steel and concrete frames of buildings on the edge of the zone.

  16. An overpressure of 5 pounds per square inch will rupture eardrums, lungs, and transport a human body through the air like a rag doll in a two hundred mile an hour wind.

  17. An overpressure of just 2 pounds per square inch will flatten – literally flatten – a normal suburban house.

  18. Between five and six miles away from the initiation point all windows will splinter explosively and one hundred-mile-an-hour winds will blast into damaged buildings and scour the landscape.

  19. Ten miles away from the blast epicentre windows will disintegrate and drive deadly dagger-like slivers of glass into anybody who has not taken shelter.

  20. Such are the effects of blast overpressure spreading out from the epicentre of the explosion striking areas already hit by the instantaneous thermal shock of the detonation.

  21. Laymen will be familiar with the ‘shadows’ of victims vaporised or burned alive at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

  22. Up to two miles from the seat of the explosion everything flammable will have caught fire, and everybody within six or seven miles of the explosion will be dead or dying.

  23. The mushroom cloud of a one megaton air burst will ascend to fifteen or sixteen miles high, at which time it will be around thirty miles across.

  24. Between six and ten miles from the detonation at least twenty to thirty percent of people will be injured, and as many as ten percent as far out as ten to twenty miles. Anybody caught in the open out to the twenty mile radius will probably have been killed or seriously injured, and suffered first or second degree burns to exposed flesh.

  25. In all the urban areas struck by large nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom the subsequent corollary was widespread fire; in some parts of major cities ‘fires’ coalesced into ‘firestorms’ comparable to the worst examples of this phenomena witnessed in Japan and Germany in 1943, 1944 and 1945.

  Strikes impacting United Kingdom Territory

  The Joint Royal Engineer and Physics Research Section from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) have compiled a chronology of the order of strikes impacting life and property. This list ignores offshore detonations which did not cause damage or injury on shore and deliberately makes no attempt to assign specific times to individual strikes. It is included herein because it provides context to the subsequent ‘local’ analyses.

  It is generally accepted that the first impact on land in the United Kingdom was at 02:48 Greenwich Mean Time at Gravesend on the southern bank of the River Thames and that ground zero was approximately equidistant between the Town and the Royal Terrace Piers. The strike also levelled much of the built up area of Tilbury on the opposite shore of the estuary. The ‘strike list’ is reproduced below.

  1. Gravesend: estimated 1 megaton ground burst which also destroyed Tilbury.

  2. Chatham: estimated 1 megaton ground burst south of Naval Dockyards which also destroyed the neighbouring towns of Strood, Rochester and Gillingham.

  3. Ipswich: a high kiloton ground burst south of Little Blakenham six miles north west of the town caused only minor damage to property and few direct casualties.

  4,5,6. These apparently random 1 megaton air bursts stretched in a line approximately North Walsham – Downham Market causing a swath of devastation in places fifteen to twenty miles wide across Norfolk. Several places, including Downham Market and Swaffham were destroyed, and damage was sustained in Kings Lyn and on the Royal Estate at Sandringham and elsewhere.

  7. Canterbury: the city and much of the historic North Weald of Kent was destroyed by a 1 megaton (plus) air burst approximately two miles north east of the city’s Cathedral. Much of the devastation of this area of Kent and neighbouring Thanet cannot be differentiated from that caused by the later Manston air burst.

  8. Greater London: a high kiloton yield bomb air burst above Richmond Park. This was the first of 7 (seven) strikes in the Greater London Area – the blast overpressure of this strike overlapped with that of three other devices.

  9. Greater London: a 1 megaton range air burst believed to have detonated within seconds of the Richmond Park warhead. It went off a few hundred yards east of Bromley High Street. Like strike No. 8 its blast overpressure overlapped with that of at least three other devices.

  10. Greater London: a very low kiloton weapon (possibly a misfire in which only the uranium ‘detonator bomb’ of a two stage hydrogen weapon initiated) air burst south of Sidcup within the 2 to 3 pound per square inch blast overpressure zone of Strike No. 9).

  11. Lincoln: a warhead with a yield of at least 800 (eight hundred) kilotons air burst within half-a-mile of the centre of the city. RAF Waddington some five miles to the south of the city was badly damaged and suffered fifty percent casualties.

  12. Greater London: a 1 megaton (possibly with a yield of up to 1.6 megatons) air burst. This may have been the largest warhead successfully deployed against the United Kingdom. The zone of 100% destruction extended beyond Romford and Hornchurch to the south east some 7 or 8 miles from the epicentre of the blast.

  13. York: a sub megaton airburst detonated mid-way between Tadcaster and York causing the total destruction of much of the western side of the city.

  14,15. Greater London: two air bursts; a 1 megaton and a low kiloton (possible misfire) occurred simultaneously over Finchley and Uxbridge respectively. The Finchley air burst completed the ‘quartering’ of Greater London, ensuring that no part of ‘inner’ London was not subjected to a minimum blast overpressure wave (or several such ‘waves’) significantly lower than two pounds per square inch.

  16. Leeds: a 1 megaton air burst in the vicinity of Roundhay approximately six miles north-north-east of the city centre destroyed o
r badly damaged sixty percent of the city.

  17. Greater London: a Hiroshima-size airburst (possibly a third ‘misfire’ over the Greater London Area) almost exactly above Ilford British Rail station caused a two mile wide circle of destruction at the periphery of the larger Brentwood strike (No. 12).

  18. Liverpool: a 1 megaton air burst over the Mersey Estuary destroyed eighty percent of the city.

  19. Runcorn: a 1 megaton air burst over the village of Sutton Weave five miles south of Runcorn resulted in the eighty percent destruction of the town.

  20. Morecombe Bay: an airburst in excess of 1 megaton over the centre of the bay caused widespread severe damage on shore around it; including to the towns of Morecombe, Heysham, Lancaster, and on the Furness Peninsula.

  21. Hull and Grimsby: a large airburst (estimated at around 700 kilotons) approximately one mile off shore destroyed seventy-five percent of Hull, and fifty percent of Grimsby but (it is speculated by some as yet poorly understood fluke of blast propagation only lightly damaged the port, chemical works and refineries at nearby Immingham).

  22. Southend: a 1 megaton air burst over Rochford destroyed the town.

  23. Manston: a 700 kiloton air burst substantially destroyed the towns of Thanet and the North Foreland (Margate, Broadstairs, and Ramsgate).

  The Manston strike is timed (unofficially) at 03:51 GMT on the morning of Sunday 28th October 1962.

  24. Pentland Firth: a low kiloton yield explosion, possibly at sea probably caused the loss of several fishing vessels steering to seek shelter from bad weather in Orkney.

  Observers on Orkney reported a flash low on the horizon at around 08:44 GMT.

  A note on other warheads known to have struck the United Kingdom

  The number ‘7’ (seven) is a guess and it is likely that other devices may be found in future.

  In four cases reports refer to ‘holes in the ground’ or ‘scatters’ of radioactive debris which might have been caused by a disintegrating or crashing ‘failed’ or ‘damaged’ warhead or sub-orbital delivery vehicle.

  In three cases we have discovered whole – albeit badly damaged – bombs or the casings of the same and recognisable bomb components, or debris fields enabling the identification of the weapon types and yields.

  Five of the seven ‘crashed’ warheads/bombs were discovered in the Greater London area, another on the Isle of Wight, and one other within the perimeter of RAF Conningsby.

  From this it may be justified to surmise that no matter how bad the situation looked immediately after the Cuban Missiles War; it might have been even worse.

  Appendix 2|Economic and Fiscal Policy

  Extracts from the Third Interim Report of the Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War and the mid- and long-term implications for policy of that conflict presented to Her Majesty’s Government on Friday 25th February 1966, and reproduced herein by the kind permission of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  ________

  Economic and Fiscal Policy

  It is the view of the Committee that the prevailing centralised ‘Command Economy’ is probably unsustainable in the medium term and on several counts fails to meet the longer term requirements of reviving British industry and commerce; although it is taken as read that the present rudimentary social ‘safety net’ regime will need to stay in place for the foreseeable future.[133]

  1. The principle that Government should support in the form of a minimum cash wage and, or food, fuel and travel coupons should only be issued to persons willing to engage in work beneficial to the state or to their local community must be preserved.

  2. However, the Committee acknowledges that as the situation vis-a-vis the security of food and medical supplies improves, and personal economic opportunities (for example, opportunities increase to travel or move to a new location to take a job in either the Government or in private sector increase as economic growth creates local labour shortages), the current oppressive regulation of the workforce and the element of compunction inherent in the post-war rationing system will become in time anachronistic and conceivably, a critical disincentive to optimising economic growth and recovery.

  3. Managing the shift from a war time ‘Command Economy’ to a peace time regime which still guarantees that the focus of industry and commerce will be to benefit the United Kingdom and its people will be problematic. Not least because Trades Unions suppressed or dormant in many areas of the economy will again become active unless prohibited by law; a thing which would be unlikely to find universal favour in any likely future Parliament at such time as the current emergency regulation framework is phased out.

  4. Foremost among the Government’s dilemmas will be how to continue to move towards establishing the industrial, commercial and financial arrangements underpinning the United Kingdom economy on the basis of a sustainable ‘cash accounting’, or ‘real price’ fiscal regimen.

  5. Complicating this will be the matter of establishing the rights to the nation’s ‘assets base’; not least the equitable disposition and reasonable treatment of land and properties in the bombed cities where no extant let alone comprehensive records or registers of ownership survive.

  6. Pragmatically, the Government might take the view that ultimately all unclaimed, undocumented land regardless of anecdotal or alleged ‘historical precedence’ actually belongs to the Crown, thereby justifying the expropriation of the same by means of primary legislation in the House of Commons. Obviously, this could not be done without the explicit support of Her Majesty, the Queen.

  7. The ‘clean slate’ option outlined above would permit the Government of the day to legitimately ‘mine’ the City of London and other sites in the United Kingdom to obtain precious metals, jewels and titles to property and miscellaneous valuables possibly sufficient to fund a real ‘treasury’ or ‘exchequer’ which might then underpin, or at least, provide loan securities, enabling the transfer to a ‘real’ money economy over the next one to two years instead of having to wait for economic growth of its own course to develop tax revenues with which to fund the necessary expenditures.

  8. Presently, the Government is bankrupt. Sooner or later there will be no buyers for our ‘Reconstruction Bonds’. Since most of this ‘paper’ (specifically 5 and 10 year notes) is presently actually held by US financial institutions who realise that they are virtually worthless but may be lucrative investments in future years, we run the risk of being held hostage if an when, we are obliged to default on them when they begin to fall due at the end of this decade.

  9. Thus far the new Administration in Washington has held the line of its predecessor. There will be no Federal ‘writing down’ of so-called ‘commercial United Kingdom obligations to US banks’. Unfortunately, as we are in no position to meet any of the settlement terms ‘floated’ by the US Treasury Department in respect of pre-war obligations listed by the US Treasury Department it may be that nothing short of a direct threat to default on all US commitments becomes our only option at some time in the next few years.

  10. In this connection it is noted that senior members of the Democratic Party have indicated their dissatisfaction with the conduct of the reconstruction element of the presently stalled ‘peace process’ in Manhattan. The suggestion is that a future Democrat Administration might see a writing down of British debt as the first stage of a comprehensive peace ‘process’ and a substantive rapprochement with Oxford which might be ‘sellable’ to the American people on the basis that (like the Marshall Plan it is ‘good for business’ and that what is good for business is ‘good for America’).

  11. Presently, treaties with Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia guaranteeing the Commonwealth’s oil supplies as a quid pro quo for military and technical economic assistance to the Governments of these countries has ensured that the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth Allies can exist independently of North and South American oil cartels.

  12. Likewise, our trading relationships with our Commonwealth Allies permit us to once again
aspire to be a great exporter of manufactures. Payment in kind, raw materials and specie is already beginning to stabilise Government finances now that the decision has been made to temporarily suspend all scheduled payments due on pre-war United Kingdom ‘debt instruments’ held by citizens of or departments of the United States and US ‘shell’ and other US ‘tax exempt’ financial entities in the Americas and US client states.

  13. In relation to the above it seems that the President accepted this without comment when the Prime Minister informed him of our intention in the autumn. She reported to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on her return to England that the President (possibly distracted by his mounting domestic and overseas ‘difficulties’) gave her the impression he was little interested in discussing ‘small change’.

  14. The Chancellor feels that if and when the President, or his successor, becomes better apprised of the worsening situation of several of the biggest US banks he will wish to revisit this subject. Like the Prime Minister he is of the opinion that we owe the United States nothing; essentially, we paid our debts in full with the blood and sacrifice of our people and it is this approach which should mitigate all future discussions with the US Administration vis-a-vis our pre-October 1962 ‘dollar obligations’.