Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  The Backstory

  TTAPS was indeed influential; it raised awareness of a consequence of nuclear war that few policymakers had considered. And its authors, like most people, were opposed to nuclear war, just like the conspiracy theory claims.

  TTAPS was published during the Reagan administration, a critical time in the Cold War when both the United States and the Soviet Union were rattling their nuclear sabers. President Ronald Reagan was keen on the SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative space-based missile defense system nicknamed Star Wars). Dr. Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” was a passionate advocate for building a stronger deterrent against the Soviets. In this pro-escalation environment, a caution against the perils of nuclear war had more of an appearance of anti-defense political propaganda than it did of sound science. Teller and other conservative scientists branded the TTAPS authors as peaceniks who conspired to publish faulty science to promote their antinuclear agenda.

  But TTAPS also came under fire from mainstream science. The first serious rebuttal to TTAPS came three years after its publication from Joyce Penner at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Penner looked at the TTAPS analysis and found that the result of nuclear winter was tied almost entirely to a single variable in the equation: exactly how much smoke would be produced by the fires triggered by each nuclear bomb. Penner found that this question was virtually impossible to answer, because every instance would be different. And, from the historical data available, the level of smoke would almost certainly be far lower than the value TTAPS gave it to arrive at the nuclear winter scenario.

  But perhaps the most influential rebuttal was a paper titled “Nuclear Winter Reappraised,” which was published the same year as Penner’s paper. However, this rebuttal wasn’t published in a scientific journal, but in the political journal Foreign Affairs. Its two environmental scientist authors Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider found that TTAPS was indeed exaggerated, but not nearly as much as Penner had characterized it. They used the term nuclear autumn, which is probably considered the most accurate description today.

  In 1991 the TTAPS theory was put to the test when, pursued by the Coalition Forces in the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait. In a literal scorched-earth policy, the Iraqis set fire to some 700 oil wells throughout January and February, which took most of the year to put out. These fires produced about a million tons of smoke, and the TTAPS team predicted global climate consequences, which ultimately never happened. Analysis revealed that although the quantity of smoke was enough to justify the TTAPS prediction, that smoke failed to get into the upper atmosphere, and so was unable to form the long-lasting screen that was predicted. Thus, the climate consequences were negligible.

  The second test came in June of 1991, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, forcing roughly 17 million tons of smoke into the air. This time, the TTAPS theory held up. Global temperatures dropped by nearly a full degree and sunlight was reduced by 10 percent. It took nearly three years for things to get back to normal. However, global agriculture was not significantly impacted.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  In 1995 Carl Sagan, the most famous of the five TTAPS authors, published his famous book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. In a chapter discussing how the scientific method works, he discussed in detail how and why the TTAPS team had been wrong with its predictions.

  The Explanation

  Although some regard TTAPS as a conspiracy—a case of ideology-driven scientists bending reality to promote some political agenda—there is no evidence of this. What there is evidence of, however, is that the TTAPS paper and its subsequent corrections are exactly how the scientific method works. Any scientist knows that science is a continually self-correcting process. In good science, all conclusions are provisional, and they are always subject to change if new information turns up.

  Prior to the TTAPS paper, there had actually been two atomic (though not nuclear) bombs detonated in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. Had those events produced smoke sufficient to cause a nuclear winter? No, but there are clear reasons for this.

  First is that a modern nuclear war, a worst-case scenario such as that discussed in the TTAPS paper, would involve many more than just two weapons—about 150, according to strategic thought of the day. Second, thermonuclear weapons today are far larger than the atomic bombs of World War II and would destroy and/or influence a much larger area.

  The bomb in Hiroshima did trigger a large number of fires. In fact, it created a firestorm, where a central upward-flowing draft of heat draws in wind from the circumference. It took about six hours for everything combustible within a 1.5-kilometer radius of ground zero to be completely consumed, leaving a total of about 8 square kilometers completely burned. Hundreds of smaller fires were scattered over a larger area, but nearly all had been put out by the next day. Thus, when we look at photographs of Hiroshima after the bomb, we do not see large volumes of smoke.

  Nagasaki was a simpler case. The landscape there was hilly, which kept that bomb’s effects much more contained. The fires that burned after the Nagasaki bomb burned longer because they were more geographically scattered, but they were also much smaller and fewer in number than the ones in Hiroshima. Photos of Nagasaki also show clear skies above; the smaller fires simply didn’t produce enough smoke to have any real effect.

  Charges of a conspiracy by TTAPS to influence politics simply do not hold up. Its methods were valid; however, it erred in choosing an absolute worst-case scenario for it principle variable. Far more likely is the less destructive nuclear autumn, where some cooling and loss of agriculture would probably be easily survivable. It was easy for most reasonable people who oppose nuclear war to support TTAPS due to its antinuclear implications, and difficult to contradict for fear of appearing to dismiss the dangers of nuclear weapons. The physicist Freeman Dyson perhaps described it best when he said:

  [TTAPS is] an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight . . . . Who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?

  9/11 Building Collapses

  * * *

  Date: September 11, 2001

  Location: New York, New York

  The Conspirators: The US government

  The Victims: The American public

  * * *

  The Theory

  During the attacks on September 11, 2001, New York’s World Trade Center was destroyed, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, was severely damaged, and United Airlines Flight 93, said to have been en route to crash into the White House, went down, and all aboard died.

  The most fanatical of all conspiracy theorists believe that these were not a coordinated attack by Islamic terrorists, but were in fact a false flag attack by the American government upon its own people, intended to create anger against Islamic states and breed support for a war. These theorists claim that the Twin Towers and Building 7 had all been rigged with explosives in advance by government agents and destroyed in a controlled demolition that was set to mimic a terrorist attack.

  The Truth

  All three buildings were destroyed by fire, the initial cause of which was the impact of the two airliners into the Twin Towers. There were no explosives used in any of them, the US government wasn’t involved, and there was nothing unexpected about their collapses from an engineering perspective.

  The Backstory

  The historical tensions between Islam and Judaism go back more than 1,000 years, and are beyond the scope of this book. But the involvement of the United States in this conflict is much newer. When Israel was created after World War II, the United States was merely one of many nations sympathetic to their cause, but in the decades since, the United States has been Israel’s most important supporter. Israel has received more financial aid from the United States than any other nation, and one big reason is its strategically important location inside the Middle East. Any bullet fired by Israe
l in a conflict against Islamic forces was likely paid for with American dollars; and accordingly, Islamic extremists have long had their eye on the United States as a target. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were, quite probably, eventually inevitable.

  As with so many national tragedies in the United States, conspiracy-mongering started immediately. The first was that 9/11 was perpetrated by Israel, in hopes of starting a holy war against Islam. This began with a story that was widely circulated in the alternative press that 4,000 Jewish people received warning not to report to their jobs at the World Trade Center and were thus saved. Within a few months the conspiracy theories evolved into some desperately complex stories implicating governments and individuals and money and oil; everything was thrown into the pot, no matter how self-contradictory or irrational, as long as it denied the actual events that everyone witnessed on that day.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  The 9/11 conspiracy community is best represented by an organization called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. On their website, more than 30,000 conspiracy theorists worldwide have signed a petition demanding that the events of 9/11 be reinvestigated. Of these, some 11 percent self-report some engineering background or education, though nearly all in irrelevant fields such as software, audio, or web design. Of those few with the expertise that the website highlights, most can be searched on the web and found to also promote other bizarre conspiracies. Suffice it to say that the main point communicated by their website is that their view is far out on the fringe.

  Eventually three claims emerged that were specific enough to be testable. One was that the towers fell “faster than free fall”—presumably, the speed at which debris would fall if not connected to any supported structures—though it has never been made clear why this might be or what it would prove. Second was the fact that jet fuel—the principal accelerant that started the fires—burns at a maximum temperature of 1500°F and steel melts at 2750°F. Therefore, said the theorists, there is no possible way that the fires started by the airliner crashes could have caused the buildings’ structures to fail. The third point emerged a few years later, when Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease on Building 7, said in a TV interview that he told the firefighters to “pull it,” and the conspiracy theorists took this as an order to detonate the explosives. This, of course, indicated to them that Silverstein himself was a key member of the conspiracy.

  The Explanation

  Let’s put the first conspiracy theory—about 9/11 being a Jewish plot—to rest right away. There was no email. No Jewish people or people of any other religious background stayed home because they had been forewarned about the attack. In fact, many Jewish people died on 9/11 along with people of every religion and nationality.

  Also, the argument that the towers fell faster than free fall has never been made in a rational way. First of all, there is no one “free-fall” speed. A parachute has a much slower free-fall speed than, say, a bowling ball. Now, while the billowing dust clouds make it impossible to accurately say exactly how long it took each tower to collapse, most of these claimants say it took about sixteen seconds. Calculations show that a standard steel I-beam of the type used to form the structure of such buildings would take about nine seconds to fall the height of the Twin Towers. The videos of the Twin Towers collapsing make it clear that the beams from the sides of the building fall away much faster than the core collapses all the way down, which makes it easy to see that this theory is false. The cores of the buildings clearly collapsed more slowly than the debris coming off of them fell.

  When it comes to the theory about the melting point of steel, let’s just clarify and say that nobody ever claimed that the steel girders in the buildings had to melt (i.e., liquefy) for the buildings to collapse. They only needed to soften a bit. Blacksmiths prove that steel glows red and can be worked into any shape at only 560°F, far less than the 1500°F at which jet fuel burns. So there was nothing unexpected about all three buildings’ structural failure from fire alone. There have been many other examples of this happening throughout history. For example, citywide firestorms triggered by attacks in World War II destroyed hundreds of tall, steel-framed buildings that were not otherwise damaged. Twisted steel girders and other reminders are on public display at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Tokyo, Japan, the Imperial War Museums in London, England, and the Dresden City Museum in Dresden, Germany, for anyone who would like to personally inspect how dramatically fire alone can mangle a steel building structure.

  Finally, on the claim that Larry Silverstein ordered the demolition triggered by telling the firemen to “pull it”: a direct inquiry to Controlled Demolition, Inc. (the world’s largest demolition contractor) revealed that they have never used that term for triggering a demolition, nor have they ever heard it used elsewhere in the industry. In a PBS interview, Silverstein recounted a phone call he received from the fire department commander as they were fighting the fires that raged inside Building 7. The firemen had reported structural groaning and an ominous bulge on the building’s exterior between the 10th and 13th floors. Fearing an imminent collapse, the commander recommended pulling the battalion out of the building, which Silverstein agreed to as evidenced by the fact that those firemen were no longer in the building when it did collapse shortly thereafter. Silverstein recounted:

  I said, “We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.” And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.

  In any case, the claim had been illogical from the beginning. If the final go/no-go decision had been Silverstein’s to make, the basic narrative would have been that a government conspiracy led by President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld organized everything and had the building somehow surreptitiously wired with explosives, a multi-month job that nobody noticed. Then, on the day of the attack, they put the actual go/no-go decision into the hands of the building’s owner (for some reason), and then had him go on national TV and reveal to the world that the demolition had been deliberate. If that was their strategy, it was not a wise one.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  The National September 11 Memorial & Museum opened ten years to the day after the attacks, and commemorates the 2,977 victims of 9/11 plus the six victims of the 1993 bombing. Its two pools are located in the footprints where the Twin Towers once stood.

  The Pentagon and the Missile

  * * *

  Date: September 11, 2001

  Location: Washington, DC

  The Conspirators: The US government

  The Victims: The American public

  * * *

  The Theory

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, something flew into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and destroyed a section of the building in a powerful explosion. All the evidence that exists shows that it was American Airlines Flight 77, a hijacked Boeing 757 that had just left Washington Dulles International Airport en route to Los Angeles. But a popular conspiracy theory states that this story is a false cover-up, and that there was no Flight 77. Instead, theorists say, what struck the Pentagon was a missile fired by the US government as part of an enormous “inside job” the government itself planned to carry out all of the 9/11 attacks.

  The Truth

  American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing 184 victims on the airplane and inside the building.

  The Backstory

  The attack on the Pentagon (and on the Twin Towers in New York City) took everyone by surprise. Before anyone had any idea what had happened, fire crews were arriving to fight the inferno and rescue dozens of people trapped in the rubble of the collapsed building. Only as the events of the day unfolded did anyone realize that this was part of the much larger 9/11 attacks. But within a few weeks, conspiracy theorists had amassed a number of claims that they believed constituted proof that 9/11 was an inside job, executed by the American government, and not by some group
of what they believed were fictional terrorists.

  First, they claimed that there was no aircraft wreckage at the Pentagon site. If an entire airliner had actually crashed there, the parts of an entire airliner would be scattered everywhere. Second, the radar track of the incoming object (whatever it was) was made public, and it showed radical maneuvers, and the conspiracy theorists claimed that this track was much too tight and unsafe for a 757 to have made. Only a small missile could have flown such a wild path, they said. Third, they said that the Pentagon’s defense systems would have shot down any incoming threat, plane or missile, and because no such defense system appeared to have been used proves that the government allowed the attack to take place.

  Finally, only one security camera video was ever found that actually showed the object impact the building. It was from a parking gate. Far off in the background of the camera’s field of view, a small white streak flew in low—visible for only a single frame—and explosively struck the building. Conspiracy theorists who analyzed this streak claimed that it was clearly far, far too small to be a 757, and lacked a plane’s tall vertical tail.

  The Explanation

  What happens in cases like this is usually that conspiracy theorists begin with their preferred conclusion—that the attack was perpetrated by the government against its own people—and then work backward looking for confirming evidence or anomalies and fitting them into their narrative. 9/11 Truthers tend to believe very deeply that the US government is actively engaged in open warfare against its own citizens, and so they begin with the conclusion that whatever happened here was not carried out by Islamic hijackers.