MARK H. GAFFNEY • SEPTEMBER 25, 2023
Skeptics have pointed to the alleged absence of radiation at ground zero as proof that nuclear weapons were not used to demolish the twin towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. This argument, however, is a logical fallacy that can never rise to the level of proof because the alleged absence of radiation is not evidence of its absence. Such thinking is a red herring that, unfortunately, has set back the cause of 9/11 truth by many years. The subject of nukes has been taboo within the 9/11 truth community ever since Dr Steven Jones posted his 2007 letter at the Journal of 911 Studies.
Dr Jones and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have ruled out nukes for reasons that do not withstand closer scrutiny. Although the World Trade Center could have been demolished with conventional weapons, I will argue in this paper that for a number of reasons small nukes were the optimal tool for the job; and for this reason they were probably used. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to briefly review the Plowshare program.
Operation Plowshare
In 1957-1958, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) unveiled a visionary program to utilize nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes. They called it the Plowshare program, after a passage in Isaiah (2:4): “they will beat their swords into plowshares.” The group was led by none other than Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb. The idea was to put nukes to work constructing canals, reservoirs, harbors and highways. The LLNL scientists pointed out that nukes were especially attractive for large public works projects that require the removal of vast amounts of rock and earth because no conventional means could match the tremendous cost savings afforded by nuclear explosives.
A plan was unveiled to construct a wider Panama Canal that would handle much larger ships. Later, in 1968, the LLNL scientists also proposed a replacement for the Suez Canal that had closed during the June 1967 Six Day war. A number of vessels had been sunk in the canal during that war, and clearing them as well as removing thousands of mines was proving difficult and time consuming. (The Suez canal did not finally reopen until 1975.) The group around Teller proposed construction of an alternative canal “through friendly territory”, in other words, through the state of Israel. (Edward Teller et al, The Constructive Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1968, McGraw Hill, p.vi.)
And there were other proposals. It was envisioned that underground nukes would make it feasible to cheaply extract natural gas and also retort oil directly from oil-sand deposits in Canada, and from oil-shale deposits in the western US. I was a student at Colorado State University, in those days, and I well remember the local press reports about the underground nuclear tests at Rulison in 1969 and Rio Blanco in 1973. I wrote for the CSU newspaper, at the time, and penned an op/ed against the Rio Blanco test.
From the start, the biggest challenge faced by Plowshare was selling the public on the idea. Could nukes be used safely without endangering nearby communities with earthquake level shocks, not to mention radioactive fallout? Peaceful nukes were controversial for obvious reasons.
Even before Plowshare, scientists at Los Alamos had been moving in the same direction, i.e., underground. The radiation from atmospheric testing was a serious threat to the scientists conducting the tests. There were also operational issues. Radiation was highly destructive to the instruments used to recover test data deemed essential to progress with the bomb program. Instrumentation was expensive and losing it ran up costs. By the mid-1950s, moving underground was a natural step.
So, it happened that the first underground nuclear test occurred in July, 1957, staged by Los Alamos, two months before the first Plowshare test. It was named “Pascal A” and was part of the Plumbbob test series. A bomb with negligible yield was placed near the bottom of a 500-foot hole in the ground. It was actually a three-foot wide unstemmed shaft, meaning it was open at the top. Once the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty went into effect (in 1963) and underground tests became the norm, scientists learned to seal the shafts (after inserting the bomb) by pouring at least 50-feet of concrete down the hole. But that first test in 1957 did have a lid of sorts, a five-foot concrete plug that vaporized during the explosion. Pascal A was a nighttime test. It went off after midnight, and project director Robert Campbell later described the intense blue plasma jet flame that leaped hundreds of feet into the sky as “The biggest damn Roman candle I ever saw…”
Although the shaft for Pascal A was basically open at the top and the yield turned out to be larger than expected (55 tons TNT), the team reported a 90% reduction in fallout. Meaning: 90% of the fallout remained in the hole. (James Carothers, Caging the Dragon, DOE/NV-388, DNA TR 95-74, 1995, p. 20-21.
Going deep underground did not eliminate the radiation, but usually it was effective at containing it. However, the Plowshare scientists were not satisfied with mere containment. They were determined to reduce radiation and, if possible, to eliminate it altogether. And, as I will show, they largely succeeded. The scientists around Teller proceeded to develop a whole new class of nuclear explosives, what they called Minimal Residual Radiation (MRR) devices. (For a discussion scroll to 4.5.4. MMR Designs)
One of their innovations was to tailor the nuclear device to the project at hand. Because most of the Plowshare projects called for excavating large amounts of rock and earth, the Teller group expanded the fusion component of the explosive at the expense of the fission side of the equation. This made perfect sense because fusion produces a much bigger bang for the buck than fission. Minimizing the size of the fission trigger also helped resolve the radiation problem.
Nuclear explosions produce two different types of dangerous radiation. In the first category are the breakdown products from fission. Therefore, minimizing the size of the fission trigger had the beneficial effect of greatly reducing the amount of fission decay products.
The second radiation problem is known as neutron activation, and results from the release of high energy neutrons during both fusion and fission reactions. At issue is the proclivity of high energy neutrons to ionize whatever material they contact, causing the formation of dangerous radionuclides. The Teller group tackled this problem head on and quickly achieved a partial solution by reconfiguring the device. For example, they substituted plastics and vanadium for various steel and aluminum components. They also replaced tungsten with lead. These design modifications resulted in a large reduction in the amounts of radioactive sodium, manganese, iron and tungsten isotopes. (Richard M. Lessler, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Reduction of Radioactivity Produced by nuclear Explosives, 1970.
But another modification was equally important. The scientists expanded the use of boron, a well-known neutron absorber. Indeed, boron is so important to the industry that nuclear power could not have developed without it. Every reactor relies on boron rods to keep nuclear fission under control. Boron is even added to the stainless steel used in the pressure vessels that hold the reactor core, for the same reason.
Ordinary boron is comprised of two stable isotopes, boron-10 and boron-11. The former makes up about 20% of the boron in our world, and the latter about 80%. Boron-10 is the preferred isotope, and is essential because of its capacity to absorb neutrons, hence, to moderate the so called neutron flux. The Plowshare scientists found that the number of escaping neutrons could be sharply reduced by packing boron-rich material around the explosive device. Each additional 15 cm (6 inches) of boron shielding resulted in a 90% reduction in free neutrons. (Lessler, Reduction of Radioactivity Produced by nuclear Explosives)
The role of boron in the Plowshare program was first disclosed in 1970 by Richard M. Lessler, a scientist at the University of California radiation laboratory. Data tables he published in a key paper show that, by 1967-68, Plowshare scientists had successfully reduced both neutron activation and fission decay products by ~99%. (Lessler, Reduction of Radioactivity Produced by nuclear Explosives)
A retrospective account by scientist James Carothers published in 1995 by the Department of Energy (DOE) indicates that nuclear scientists at Los Alamos were likewise well versed in the use of boron. According to Carothers, as early as 1954-55, the staff at Los Alamos learned to coat the test site with boron-rich material to reduce unwanted neutron activation of soil during atmospheric tests. Los Alamos scientists also adopted the practice of shielding the nuclear charge with boron. (Caging the Dragon, p. 16 and p. 530).
The data published by Lessler in 1970 documented the genuine progress made by Plowshare in reducing radiation. Ten years earlier, in 1960, Edward Teller had told a congressional committee that “I can say, not with certainty, but with quite a bit of hope that we can make nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes so clean that the worry about radiation …may disappear completely.” (William H Berman and Lee M Hydeman, Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes, 1 Nat. Res. Journal, 1961, see note 32, p.8)
As early as 1963, Teller foresaw that by minimizing the size of the fission component of a thermonuclear device “we can avoid producing the large quantities of radioactive materials characteristic of fission explosions.” (Edward Teller, Plowshare, University of California, Earnest O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Contract No. W-7405-eng-48, February 1963, p. 4. )
Teller made similar statements on many occasions. His optimism actually increased over the years as Plowshare scientists learned to tame the nuclear dragon.
Designer Explosives
In 1970, Richard Lessler was looking to the future when he confidently wrote that “a set of safety criteria should be established and then the explosive should be designed to satisfy or surpass these criteria before it is used…” In other words, progress would continue in the future. Radiation standards would be met by tailoring the device, as needed. (Lessler, Reduction of Radioactivity Produced by nuclear Explosives)
This “can do” attitude suggests that by the 1970s the US had entered a brave new world of made-to-order designer nuclear explosives. The LLNL group doubtless believed they could meet or exceed any improved radiation safety standard by reconfiguring materials and by introducing new technology. They had already licked the neutron activation problem by packing in as much boron shielding as needed. That part was easy.
The fission side of the equation was more difficult. Although they achieved major reductions in radiation by minimizing the fission trigger (to about half a kiloton), it was not possible to eliminate it entirely.
The only way to reduce fission decay products to zero would be to eliminate the fission trigger altogether. And, no doubt, this was their plan. By 1970, perhaps earlier, Teller & company were looking ahead to the once and for all resolution of the radiation issue. They would replace fission triggers with a new laser ignition device that produced none of the unwanted radiation. In this way they would inaugurate the fabled fourth generation of nukes that for them was the Holy Grail.
As we know today, developing laser triggers turned out to be elusive, if not a pipe dream, at very least, much more difficult in practice than the Plowshare scientists envisioned. While the matter is an important footnote to history, it is of little consequence for our purposes here because a clean thermonuclear device was never necessary nor optimal to bring down the twin towers. Two small fission weapons employing fissile uranium would do the job, quite nicely.
But how small?
The prolific author John McPhee provided an answer in a 1994 book based on a series of interviews with the late Theodore Taylor, senior US nuclear weapons designer. (John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011, p. 15, p. 124, p. 156, p. 194, p. 225, p. 226)
Over his long career Theodore Taylor racked up many solid achievements. As I reviewed his bio I was struck by the fact that even though Taylor was strongly anti-nuclear he became the foremost US expert on fission weapons. The man must have been a curious contradiction. Taylor is credited with designing the smallest fission weapon in the US arsenal at the time, known as the Davy Crockett. It weighed only fifty pounds and was fired out of a specially designed cannon like an artillery shell. But Taylor also designed the largest fission bomb ever produced by the US, the Super Oralloy Bomb (SOB) rated at 500 kilotons. Taylor’s work on fission was so innovative that he was given a free hand. His other contributions include beryllium neutron reflectors and the General Dynamics TRIGA pulse reactor. The physicist Freeman Dyson worked closely with Taylor and later described him as “the greatest man I ever knew well.”
I have fleshed this out to establish that Dr Taylor knew his business.
So when the conversations with McPhee turned to the World Trade Center (the two men revisit the issue a half dozen times in the book) Taylor went on record that about six grams of fissile material would be sufficient to take down each tower. That’s .2 ounces of bomb-grade material per tower, the mass equivalent of 1-2 sticks of chewing gum. Or, in TNT equivalents: .1 kiloton.
Forget the wild-eyed estimates of the Russian Dmitri Khalezov (150 kilotons) and the Frenchman Francois Roby (80 kilotons). And yes, forget Heinz Pommer as well (100 kilotons). A device based on the lowest of their insane figures would have taken out all of lower Manhattan.
As we know, the Plowshare program failed to gain wider acceptance and was abruptly canceled in 1975. The program fell out of favor because it could not deliver the promised economic benefits. The projects were not commercially viable. The only “benefits” that accrued from Plowshare were the innovations I have described that potentially made nukes attractive to terrorists. I do not mean the garden variety but rather, the deep state kind who operate under the cover of anonymity. This is why Plowshare is relevant to 9/11. Even if the truther community fails to appreciate the point, it’s a safe bet that the “strides” taken during Plowshare regarding designer nukes were not lost on the criminals who planned the destruction of the twin towers. It’s quite likely they viewed the World Trade Center job as a technical challenge, and tailored the explosive accordingly. They were operating under some tight and unforgiving constraints…
To Catch a Thief
To catch a thief it is sometimes necessary to think like one. Solving the crime of 9/11 therefor requires that we put ourselves in the shoes of the individuals who were responsible (however distasteful this might be) and try to see the world through their jaundiced eyes.
In this paper I have already shown that Dr Jones was wrong about neutron activation. Incidentally, the documents I cited on this are a matter of public record and have been for many years. Most were available even before the 9/11 attacks. A comprehensive literature review would have brought all of this to light, long ago. Perhaps the real question is why Dr Jones and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth failed to look.
As I am about to show, Dr Jones was also wrong about the fission products. This is where Theodore Taylor’s well informed professional opinion matters. His assertion that two low-yield devices would have been sufficient to take down the twin towers changes the conversation. Even if the actual yield was slightly higher than Taylor’s .1 kiloton estimate, say, on the order of .3-.4 kilotons, the total amount of fissile material needed for each tower still would have been only about 15-20 grams. The total for both would have been 30-40 grams (1.4 ounces). The amount of fission products would have been roughly the same. In other words, we are talking about a minuscule amount of fallout that would have been dispersed amidst 600,000 tons of debris from both towers. (Gregory H. Urich, Analysis of the Mass and Potential Energy of World Trade center Tower 1, 2007)
An estimated 10% of the dust from the pulverized WTC concrete, totaling about 50,000 tons, ended up off site. So, we would likewise expect that about 10% of the fallout, i.e. 3-4 grams (.10 -.14 ounces) also would have ended up off site mixed in with the 50,000 tons of dust. That’s not parts per million, nor even parts per billion, that’s parts per trillion. Because of the extreme dilution factor, radiation readings off site would have been negligible. This is why Dr Jones’s reliance on a survey done a month later not even on site but involving Hudson River sediment fails the laugh test.
Radiation would have been detectable on the pile, yes, for a time. Insofar as I am aware, however, no US government or state authority ever published the results of such a survey at ground zero. Did such a radiation survey happen? If so, I have not seen the report. If it did I would greatly appreciate it if someone would please bring this to my attention. If the results were negative, why did the authorities not publish it? If hard data ruled out nukes, there would have been every reason to headline the fact and silence the conspiracy kooks, and no reason not to.
As for tritium, the trace amounts that were detected on site are consistent with the use of small fission weapons.
The logical placement of a designer device would have been at the bottom of freight elevator 50, the only elevator that serviced every floor in the tower. The shaft was located very near to the center of the core, and serviced all of the sub-levels down to bedrock. No other elevator reached down to the lowest sub-level B-6. The shaft for freight elevator 50 had actually been cut deep into the granite below the foundations of the tower. A pit and drainage sumps had also been cut below the shaft to service the freight elevator. A device placed at this lowest point would have been surrounded by granite on all sides, save one. Straight up.
The pit and sumps could easily have been filled with water heavily laced with borax and boric acid. This would have cut the neutron activation nearly to zero.
If/when the device went off a vertical spear of nuclear plasma exceeding millions of degrees would have shot up through the center of the building. When it hit the top of the elevator shaft it would have spread out and destroyed the tower from the top down, exactly what we observed.
Properly placed conventional charges, possibly thermite/thermate, would have assured the complete destruction of the mid to lower floors. Although conventional explosives alone certainly could have demolished the twin towers, nukes were essential to pulverize the top third of each building. This prevented the towers from tipping over, which could have caused more extensive damage to the financial district. It was imperative that Wall Street reopen as soon as possible. The use of nukes also helped insure that the “bathtub” surrounding the World Trade Center remained intact. Sole reliance on conventional explosives would have produced over-pressures that risked breaching the bathtub, in which case the Hudson River would have flooded lower Manhattan including the subway system. Wall Street would have been closed indefinitely. This had to be avoided.
Pulverizing the top third of the buildings with small nukes substantially reduced the risks. And, as we know, although the collapses caused some cracks in the bathtub, it held firm. From the planners’ perspective, the use of nukes was a great success. And the best part (from their standpoint) was that they escaped detection.
Solving a crime requires asking the right questions. Had the 9/11 truth community done so from the start there is a high likelihood truthers would have exposed the coverup, long ago, and solved the crime of the century. In that case, we might also have turned things around in our country and world. Today, as we tremble on the brink of nuclear war with Russia, it may be too late. I pray this is not the case. But even if it is, the hour is never too late to expose the truth.
(Note: This article would not have been possible without assistance from a fact-checker who cannot be named.)
Endorsed Only
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Well written – well reasoned – well done!
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I can hear the hasbara rats gathering in the walls. We’re in for another Biblical-scale Plague of Chutzpah with this one. Here they come. . .
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Taylor is credited with designing the smallest fission weapon in the US arsenal at the time, known as the Davy Crockett. . . The physicist Freeman Dyson worked closely with Taylor and later described him as “the greatest man I ever knew well.” . . . Taylor went on record that about six grams of fissile material would be sufficient to take down each tower. That’s .2 ounces of bomb-grade material per tower, the mass equivalent of 1-2 sticks of chewing gum. Or, in TNT equivalents: .1 kiloton.
Remember the Alamo. . . Never forget!
• Agree: A. Clifton -
very plausible explanation, of the implausible events of 9/11, that we have been force fed for two+ decades.
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As lunatic as Plowshare’s rep was, the reasoning here is sound and sensible.
Minor quibble with conclusion: The Truthers proved the cover-up years ago. At least as far back as the 911 widow’s refusal of almost 2 million dollars in hush money, then her death in a suspicious plane crash that squelched her truth-seeking lawsuit.
Perps proved they were guilty when they knocked off the witness.
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The author’s reasoning is highly speculative and posits the perpetrators’ use of a hypothetical nuclear weapon that not only produces a mere 200-800 pounds of TNT-equivalent yield, but also apparently results in a minimal shockwave, converting the energy into highly coherent plasma currents which an elevator shaft contains and guides to the top of the tower, at which point the plasma currents dissociate and vaporize/pulverize the upper stories to prevent them from causing the tower to lean during collapse–all going exactly as planned in a first-of-its-kind method of skyscraper demolition.
This nuclear plasma gun, meanwhile, is fired in a chamber that is open on one side before it then transitions to the barrel (the elevator shaft), but neither the open chamber nor the elevator shaft disrupt the blast’s propagation.
So convincing is the above scenario that I’ve taken my trusty revolver, replaced the original barrel for one made of perforated cardboard, and carved a slot into a cylinder into which I’ve loaded a split-open cartridge. I’m now off bear hunting and should have no problem dispatching with this one shot that ornery grizzly down the road.
• Replies: @Mark H. Gaffney, @Che Guava -
roonaldo,
FYI, .3-.4 kilotons = 300 -400 Tons of TNT — not pounds.
Also, the shaft and the chamber are one and the same. There is no “transition to the barrel” as you state.
Mark -
Thank you for the correction on the yield that I completely spaced out on. It makes the pressure/shock problem far worse, though. The insane force of a pressure/shock wave from the equivalent of 300-400 tons of TNT is going to obliterate its surroundings and tear apart the pit-building interface and the elevator shaft, which was never designed nor constructed as a nuclear artillery piece capable of withstanding such forces and will be riddled with doors, piping, ducts, etc..
The conspirators could not have realistically tested such a method beforehand. It would have all been a theoretical approach, rather than adapting well-known demolition techniques to the problem of bringing down the towers. Add to all these unknowns the difficulties and risks of acquiring extremely high-tech designer nukes as opposed to advanced conventional materials.
The “Pascal B” test sunk a three-ft. diameter, 500 foot deep shaft. One account I read said they used a 55 ton-yield device and another source asserted a 300 ton-yield device. At any rate, the one-ton steel plug they used to seal the top of the shaft was caught on but one frame of high speed film after the explosion and was estimated to be moving at 125,000 miles per hour. If a Twin Tower elevator shaft had truly been able to direct and contain a nuclear blast, there would have been a phenomenal exit trail.
I respect those who try to analyze what forensic clues remain, but solid evidence for the basement nuclear device theory just isn’t there, is unnecessarily risky and impractical for conspirators to attempt, and creates physical forces impossible for the pit and elevator shaft to withstand.
• Replies: @Fact Checker -
Roonaldo: Your questions are good, but move at a somewhat different level of abstraction than the article. To work out all the details of the proposed nuclear demolition scheme would take a lot more work – and a far longer article – than Mr Gaffney’s introductory overview.
A lot of people aren’t even familiar with Project Plowshare, let alone the myriad of other applicable concepts – including:
• ADM (atomic demolition munition a.k.a. “nuclear landmines”);
• MRR (minimum residual radiation) designs a.k.a “clean nukes”;
• NDEW (nuclear directed energy weapons) a.k.a. “nuclear shaped charges”; and
• NPL (nuclear pumped lasers), a.k.a. “Star Wars nukes”.
The list is longer, but you get the point. There are many design themes that can be used, and mixed, to craft tailor-made devices for a demolition job like the one proposed in the article.What is more, to evaluate the feasibility of nuclear demolition, one would also need to take into account the details of the geometry and configuration of the detonation pit. We’ve got Manhattan bedrock on five sides out of six containing the (fairly small) fraction of the shockwave that hits sideways and down when using a directional “shaped charge” type design.
WTC blueprints also reveal there’s a one-foot-thick concrete roof on the pits, with an oversized manhole for access. Leaving that manhole cover on whilst blowing the nuke would definitely create the “orbital steel lid” effect you’re referring to with Pascal-A (Pascal-B is a different shot). But this, of course, is easily avoided by simply removing the lid.
https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html#PascalAPoint is, there’s a lot of fine print to pit configuration, aperture of the plasma ray (“fireball”) shooting out of the pit when firing, and also to device design and emplacement. You simply can’t expect to cover all that ground in one introductory article.
As to conventional demolition, things aren’t quite so simple as you portray them. The key point is, the towers were simply too tall and heavy to be dropped straight down. It would have broken the bathtub slurry wall, thus flooding all of Lower Manhattan and then some.
Potential energy is proportional to the third power of the length of the tower, meaning about two-thirds of p.e. is lodged in the top third of the tower. A two-stage approach to demolition, first pulverising the top third and ejecting the debris laterally, then cutting down the stumps conventionally with shaped charges cutting steel columns, would take a lot of pressure off the bathtub.
Studying the seismographic record of 9/11 also suggests that only about 60% of the towers came straight down; the top 40% never registered as debris percussion. Studying the collapse dynamics further reveals an S-shaped curve for collapse speed, with the collapse slowing down between stages, then picking up again.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.06207.pdf#page=20All this is consistent with the combined two-stage “nuclear top, conventional stumps” demolition scheme proposed in the article.
As to feasibility constraints, bear in mind they’re also on the conventional side. How do you rig a conventional demolition that pulverises the top third of the towers and ejects the debris laterally? Drilling hundreds of thousands of equally spaced holes in the concrete slabs, then sticking in the dynamite and wiring the whole thing up simply isn’t doable when the towers are in use.
Also consider the sheer amounts of explosives it would take. We’re talking 200 tons’ worth of TNT just to pulverise that amount of concrete, and that’s with said drill holes and thus mining-and-quarrying level coupling. If you loosen the coupling, the amounts will increase by at least another order of magnitude. We’re then talking 2,000 tons of TNT or more.
When you consider the details, what becomes truly ludicrous is the idea of conventionally blowing up the towers like they were evidently blown up on 9/11. It just cannot be done. But if it cannot be done conventionally, then how was it done? The yield figures alone are way out of the conventional ballpark. But if we’re way out of the conventional ballpark, then surely we’re in nuclear territory.
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This is a fine article, and a very interesting premise, which I applaud.
However, to me, it still looks like a controlled demolition of the most conventional type, just like in building 7.
And, if bldg. 7 was pre-wired for it, which it obviously was, then there is no reason to think that the twin towers weren’t as well.
Which presents another possibility, that all high rise buildings in major population centers are as well, “just in case”? Seems absurd, but I could see it.
Once again, building 7- They didn’t even fake an airplane impact on it, to give any plausible reason for it’s collapse. Was this a colossal mistake? Why bring down 1 of 3 buildings, without even an attempt to justify it’s collapse? It’s such a gross outlier.
Then, there is the Pentagon hoax. What role does it play in all of this? Just to cover-up for the missing money? It’s worse than the building 7 bullshit. An invisible jumbo jet, skimmed the lawn after the most improbable air maneuver ever, then totally vaporized on impact, leaving no debris, and causing a hole no bigger than the fuselage, while the wings apparently vaporized as well?
Serious question- If the Two WTC were the original scam, why do building 7, which just looked fishy as fuck, and why do the Pentagon crap, which looks even more ridiculous (and was also the element of that day, that completely sold me on the whole event being planned, fake, and bullshit) and provably false?
If you just had the two “airplanes” hit the two buildings, and those two buildings fell down (even super suspiciously), at least on paper this whole event would have made a certain amount of sense.
There still would have been skeptics, but not as many as we got with bldg. 7 and the Pentagon!Was it a false flag, that kinda failed, because no holograms hit bldg. 7, but they decided to “pull it” anyway, and then, some brilliant dork said, “let’s shoot an air-to-ground into the money offices at the Pentagon, real quick, while all this other shit is going on, and “fix” that missing money thing!”
WTC 1 & 2, fishy.
Bldg. 7, super fishy.
The Pentagon, fishy as fuck.
Shanksville, Penn., beats the shit out of me, but there was no airplane in that hole, so I don’t know what part of this whole bullshit story is serves to advance, except that “four airplanes needed to go missing, and with three down and one to go, we need a crater, ASAP!”
Sadly, just like the JFK assassination, we’ll never get the truth, because there was too much cover-up, for far too long, and now, they’ve filled the air with 20 years of gorilla dust, making the idea of getting to the real truth, utterly impossible.
Suffice it to say- 9/11 stinks! But most of the dupes believed it, so the next one will probably be even worse (and happen any day now), and it will sail right past the heads of the public once again.
Propaganda is a helluva drug!
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I thought the nuclear theory was pretty well discredited in the comment thread a few weeks ago. Where are the nuclear physicists who support such an outlandish theory? There are several thousand signatories over at the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 truth site. Where is the evidence of radiation? In post 9/11 NYC there were plenty of frightened people with Geiger counters.
This can only serve to discredit the broader 9/11 truth movement.
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JLK,
You thought wrong.The nuclear physicists turned out to be underwhelming, to say the least.
Evidently, you failed to notice that Dave the Physicist’s progressive collapse model was just debunked once and for all by the mathematician Ansgar Schneider in the video posted in comment #9 by Fact Checker. Scroll up to comment#9.
How does a progressive gravitational collapse generate an “S” curve? Can’t happen.
The “S” curve means there were two separate energy inputs. In plain English: Steel buildings don’t fall down, unless something causes them to. And I am not referring to office fires which had zero effect on the massive box columns and exterior wall.
Mark
• Replies: @Jonathan Revusky -
Isn’t it the case that the 9/11 truth movement has discredited itself by failing to find out what happened at the World Trade Center, let alone doing anything about it?
The “no radiation” objection is a red herring as no easily measurable radiation would be expected beyond the cordoned-off perimeter around the WTC site. I thought Mr Gaffney went to great lengths to explain that. Did you even bother with reading the article?
The key evidence of radiation consists of sharply elevated rates of thyroid cancer among 9/11 responders. Several studies have been carried out to adjust for screening bias and such, but the elevated incidence persists on a highly significant level.
In addition to that, there are details in recently released WTC Health Program studies showing how thyroid cancer distinguishes itself from other chemical toxins-based cancers. This comes in addition to radioiodine being the only well known and documented environmental cause (or “risk factor”) behind thyroid cancer. Exposure to radioiodine therefore remains as the sole explanation of said thyroid cancer epidemic.
Envisioning people running around Lower Manhattan with privately-owned Geiger meters may work in one’s imagination, but in reality none of that happened – or at least none of it has been documented. And again, even if it happened, there would be no elevated radiation to measure outside the cordoned-off perimeter. So the “private Geiger meter” objection simply doesn’t fly.
As to official measurements, I’m pretty sure they exist as it would amount to dereliction of duty not to measure radiation on and around the WTC site, and we also know there are stationary meters around the city. The question there is why these measurements have not been published. If there was no radiation, why didn’t they simply publish the data? I find that every bit as suspicious as the government’s refusal to publish the serial numbers of the aircraft parts recovered from the debris.
Also, as I’m sure you’re aware, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”. While no outright radiation measurements have been published, the thyroid cancer epidemic among 9/11 responders – and even, albeit to a lesser degree, among 9/11 survivors – constitutes evidence of radioiodine (primarily I-135 and I-131), which in its turn could only have come from recent nuclear fission.
Calling for established nuclear physicists to sign-on to Nuclear 9/11 is disingenuous as nuclear physicists are heavily dependent on government licensing and funding. Maybe one could find somebody in retirement to endorse it, but generally speaking it fails the Upton Sinclair test: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Absence of such endorsement doesn’t mean the proposition isn’t true.
I’ve actually been in contact with some fully established nuclear scientists about Nuclear 9/11, and could give comical examples of the length to which they’re prepared to go in order to avoid even looking at the evidence. “Thyroid cancer? I’m no oncologist!” and so on. It’s a joke, but when you think a little deeper, it’s a tragedy for the intellectual integrity of the profession.
The case for Nuclear 9/11 rests, I think, on three pillars. One is the implausibility of spontaneous collapse, the second is the unfeasibility of conventional demolition of the towers. Thirdly, there is certain evidence – including the thyroid cancer epidemic, but there is a plenty more – which simply cannot be explained by anything other than 9/11 being a nuclear event.
While it is undoubtedly true that some proponents of Nuclear 9/11 are personalities that revel in outlandishness and peddling disinformation, I personally feel offended by the accusation. I was in New York when this went down, I experienced it first-hand, lived it and smelled it. I have absolutely no interest in peddling lies, selling books, gaining notoriety, or anything of the kind.
Why is it that the nuke deniers in Architects & Engineers and related “truther” outfits simply refuse to look at the facts of the matter, instead choosing to play politics on precisely that theme you bring up, namely “Nuclear 9/11 is so outlandish it hurts the movement!” If the truth about 9/11 hurts the movement, what kind of “9/11 truth movement” is that?
• Agree: Truth Vigilante -
If folks were more fully aware of the technical details of Project Azorian – the minutia – they would understand that the use of Mini-nukes in the WTC Towers ten years later was a logical, “reasonable and ordinary” piece o’ cake for those who did it.
Enough time spent studying Project Azorian will be far more profitable than trying to figure out how the WTC demolitions were carried out.
The former is key to the latter.
Be patient – don’t form your opinion too soon . . . keep digging.
• Replies: @Mark H. Gaffney -
orchardist,
If you post some material on this or links I will definitely check it out. Thanks. Mark -
Mark,
Thanks for emailing me a heads up about your article. I’m really glad Unz published it after his friend Physicist Dave tried to completely destroy your reputation and competence as an investigative journalist.
The science is way outside my realm of competence. But perhaps these questions and observations from a friend thoroughly inept in physics might help sharpen your argument:
1. You devote the first part of your article to describing the efforts of Teller at LLNL to develop a nuclear explosive device based on fusion that would eliminate the dangers of radiation. Then when you shift to the 9/11 WTC destruction, you completely discard the fusion concept and go back to fission. This confused me and I don’t understand why you needed the whole long Teller introduction to your argument.
2. A few grams of fissile material seems incredibly paltry. Can you give us an idea of how much fissile material was in the Hiroshima nuclear bomb as a comparative example?
3. A heads up about Steven Jones. In late 2006 or early 2007, Steven Jones Kevin Barrett and Kevin Ryan spoke at CU Boulder about 9/11 truth. My wife and I attended this talk. Steven Jones spoke about his background in particle physics and after the talk I went up to speak to him and mentioned that my uncle was a particle physicist and directed SLAC at Stanford. Jones gave me a huge smile and said that he had studied under my uncle at SLAC. So this means that Jones is a particle physicist just like your great Unzian enemy David Miller. Don’t be surprised if Miller tries to trash this current article. Also since Jones is a particle physicist no doubt he’s very familiar with everything you’ve written here and that may be why he’s devoted himself to covering it up.
4. I am assuming the “Fact Checker” in the comments is the same person that you credit with helping you to write this article. Without revealing his identity can you tell us anything about how you two connected? For example did he contact you after reading either your books or online articles about 9/11?
5. I’m hoping Iris will comment here because she has long spoken about the nuclear demolition of the WTC. I wonder if she is familiar with the details you are discussing.
6. Comment number 10 asks many questions that I think are extremely pertinent to the 9/11 false flag attack. The more time goes by the more absurd the entire operation appears:
https://www.unz.com/article/did-the-plowshares-program-set-the-stage-for-nuclear-terrorism-on-september-11/#comment-61728807. You mentioned the “bathtub” in lower Manhattan. I have no idea what this is and would appreciate some explanation.
8. My last question concerns the novelty of this proposed nuclear demolition. Had the perpetrators any prior experience or access to data involving the use of a similar device to destroy a similarly enormous structure? How confident could they really be that it would detonate as they hoped? The fact is their desire to minimize the damage to lower Manhattan seems to have been realized. Was this just a matter of luck or were they basing themselves on prior empirical evidence and experience?
Thank you for fighting the good fight Mark. You are correct that even if it’s too late to stop the onslaught of evil, it’s never too late to uphold the truth. May God protect you from malicious detractors and continue to inspire you with your investigative insights.
In Jesus’ Holy Name Amen.
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Michael Korn:
You make a lot of good points, including at least one that addresses me, so I’m hoping you can forgive me for jumping in even though your comment was primarily addressed to Mr Gaffney. Let me go point by point (omitting 5 and 6 for obvious reasons).
1. For one, it is hard to discuss civilian uses of nuclear explosives without referring to Edward Teller and Project Plowshare, which is also an interesting topic in its own right. And fun too, real “mad scientist” stuff. The reference to nuclear fusion, I think, is because Dr Jones in his 2006 letter based his supposed debunking of Nuclear 9/11 on the assumption that thermonuclear devices had been employed to bring down the towers. Also, killing the “no radiation” red herring cannot be done without reference to fusion. It gets a little roundabout but that can’t be helped.
2. The rule of thumb is 1 kilogram of burned fissile material yields about 18 kilotons. So Hiroshima (15 kt) burned a little less than 1 kg whilst Nagasaki (21 kt) burned a little more than 1 kg. The reference is Carey Sublette’s “useful tables”: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq12.html
The amounts of fissile and fissionable material included in a device is not material to this question as long as it exceeds the critical mass. With Hiroshima, about 64 kg of weapons-grade uranium was included, but the burn rate was very low, barely over 1%. In a modern military nuke, the burn rate is far higher, but that’s not important to the WTC problem as miniaturisation and portability is not as severe a constraint as with military nuclear fires.3. Being a particle physicist doesn’t necessarily make one knowledgeable about nuclear engineering let alone nuclear explosives. This is abundantly clear with Dr Jones, and also, I suspect, with Dr Miller. It is impossible to tell what motives they might have, but the fact remains that their objections are so full of holes they do not stand up to even a cursory review. Whether this is due to sloppiness, incompetence or intellectual dishonesty, I cannot tell, but what I can tell is that their arguments do not hold water. Dr Miller also appears prone to resort to invective, which is hardly a sign of substantive strength.
4. I contacted Mr Gaffney after reading his previous article on Nuclear 9/11. As I had researched that area, I felt I should get in touch and offer correspondence and help with fact-checking and references to improve the exposition. I was in New York when 9/11 went down, so had researched it for personal reasons – as the official story was clearly false but the “9/11 truth community” didn’t seem able to come up with any clear and acceptable answers.
This got serious once I realized, from threshing through the considerable pile of evidence, that the event must have had a nuclear component. It’s the sort of finding that puts one in a quandary. On one hand, I would rather keep it to myself, but on the other, I’ve felt a certain obligation to reach out to people who have come to a similar conclusion, or who are engaged in 9/11 research at a level which implies a certain accountability as a “9/11 truth movement” representative.
Beyond that, it’s not important who I am, but I would rather be judged on the merits of my arguments than on my name, address or credentials. Suffice it to say I hold a math-stats type doctorate, and that I’ve had a lifelong interest in (primarily civilian) nuclear technologies.7. The Bathtub refers to a massive, sunk concrete wall surrounding the WTC garage (and towers), and which worked like an inverse bathtub – keeping Hudson River water out. I believe it was the first US application of the European “slurry” method. After 9/11, a new Bathtub had to be built as the old one had cracked but not collapsed. I’ll include here a couple of links to articles in the 9/11 aftermath, but you could also look it up online, there’s even a Wikipedia article on it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1553074.stm
https://web.archive.org/web/20170202195352/http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubes/newretainingwall.html8. Mr Gaffney in this introductory article has not been able to get into specifics about what forensic data and engineering considerations tell us about the devices employed to bring down the towers. I’ve hinted at some of it in my previous comment listing a “menu” of design themes for nuclear devices. The list of acronyms is still longer if one also considers the choice of fissile fuel in the device, and whether to approach it from a military (explosives) or civilian (pulsed reactor) point of view. It gets hairy and goes beyond the scope of the article. Suffice it to say that it could be done, and the devices evidently worked.
How difficult is it to make a nuclear explosive? Well, that depends on how advanced or exotic a design one opts for, but even the crudest device certainly requires access to fissile material and thus nuclear-state sponsorship. What the forensics add to that is that devices were certainly advanced and probably even exotic. That puts us in the higher school, which in its turn narrows down the choice of state sponsors to very few. Then they also needed access to the WTC basement and elevators, which narrows things down still further. In the end, we’re left with one or two possibilities.Finally, on Christianity, what I keep at the back of my head at all times is Cromwell’s advice: “By the bowels of Christ, bethink ye that ye may be wrong!” It’s humanly possible to be mistaken, but that obviously cuts both ways. I try to be as careful as possible, and would never venture into anything Nuclear 9/11 if I didn’t have a very respectable pile of evidence to back it with. What I fail to see, however, is the same level of care on the part of the other side. There’s a certain sloppiness about the debunkings and dismissals, and also an air of rudeness and arrogance. I’m thinking they, too, could benefit from taking some of Cromwell’s advice.
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You raise many interesting points. I don’t agree with your contention it is “truly ludicrous” to think the towers could have been brought down by utilizing demolition techniques of the time, that it “just cannot be done.”
There are very large uncertainties regarding the use of seismographic records to estimate mass of the building debris. And the central core, with its many elevator shafts, ventilation shafts, and stairwells provided ample access for the effective emplacement of charges. Many cutter charges would be necessary to separate each floor structure from its connections to the outer wall and the inner core. Each floor had three to four inches of concrete poured onto the floor-joist structures.
There is also no way to know if the “bathtub” walls would have failed if there were more mass in the debris fall, nor reason to assume that the conspirators cared if the walls breached.
A “clean” nuclear weapon or an x-ray nuke envisioned by the outer space antimissile scheme are still going to produce huge shock waves. The 1993 bombing in the WTC underground parking garage, utilizing about 1500 pounds of urea nitrate explosive, produced a crater six stories deep and 200 feet across. The author’s figure of 0.4 kilotons estimated for the subterranean blast is about 500 times more powerful.
John Skilling, head structural engineer for the construction of the towers and a noted expert on tall buildings, said in a 3/27/93 Seattle Times article titled “Twin Towers Engineered to Withstand Jet Collision” that “I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing those buildings down with explosives, that he could do it.” He was referring to building demolition by a professional with controlled demolition expertise.
There were certainly strange phenomena seen after the destruction like oddly burned vehicles that would require high energy to produce, but is a nuke required? Could a very large number of thermite and other charges coupled to the huge mass of conductive metal of the outer walls, inner core, floor joist structures, etc., produce ionizing radiation intense enough to produce such phenomena, as it all collapsed in a swirling mass of electrically conductive debris?
Many people reported underground explosions just before the towers fell, did they not? Could they have directed charges into thesteel central support spires to produce resonance and/or electrical effects upward to help shatter the central core structure? I dunno, but this idea suffers from the same problem as the exotic nuclear device theory, in that it could not have been realistically tested beforehand, and thus would create even more uncertainty for those planning a risky mission.
• Replies: @Fact Checker -
Thank you for your reply. I had ruled out all-conventional demolition as intractable or unfeasible, and I stand by that. You now object that it’s not unfeasible, but in attempting to restore it, you bypass my key argument with silence. I could simply rest my case, but will reiterate some here and also add a few points in response to your other arguments, some of which I think are good yet ultimately fail.
On conventional demolition, cutting the steel is the easy part, although even that would be hard to rig while the towers are still in use. What would be doable, I think, is a quick-and-dirty emergency demolition where columns are cut straight across on one level. I gather that’s how they took down Building 7, and from the totality of evidence, I’ve come to think they did something similar to the stumps of the towers; that is, the 60% or so that was left standing after the tops were blown out.
I brought up one insurmountable problem with conventional demolition, but which you have bypassed with silence. I’ll repeat it here, see if it takes hold this time.
Pulverising all that concrete and ejecting the debris laterally, as David Chandler and others have carefully documented, would require 200 tons of explosives (TNT equivalent) for each tower – and that’s with direct coupling meaning the dynamite sticks would be inserted into drilled holes in the concrete slabs. If you loosen the coupling, that will increase the amount by another order of magnitude or still more. We’re then talking 2,000 tons of TNT for each tower, or even more. It’s a matter of course this could not be done. That alone rules out an all-conventional demolition.
In addition to that, we’ve got very large detonations taking place underneath the towers, and which are readily apparent in the seismograms; in fact, they constitute the lion’s share of recorded activity. While you’re right that there are interpretation issues in reading seismograms, this isn’t one of them. Juxtaposing the tower shocks against the Building 7 shock enables us to extract ballpark estimates of activity components, including the underground detonations.
We’re talking 5-10 tons of TNT for each tower, based on decent coupling. With the looser coupling of a nuclear device in the sump pit, we’re at 30-40 tons, which jibes very well with a 90/10 distribution of vertical and lateral shock in a directional nuclear device (NDEW). Such a device would simply have a “plasma spout” directed upward, and through which the vast majority of the blast energy would be directed. The remainder would hit sideways and down, causing seismic tremors. All these figures are well outside the conventional ballpark.
With conventional demolition, there is no need for any major “basement blast”, but the explosives would be attached to the steel higher up, as cutter charges. It’s pretty clear they did that, too, but the magnitude isn’t enough to clearly penetrate through the noise of the underground detonations and ensuing crumbling and percussion. Comparison to the 1993 truck bombing will be halting as that bomb was in a van parked in the garage, with all-round propagation of the blast wave and no bedrock to contain it. The comparison doesn’t work.
Although I was the one who took the word “exotic” in my mouth, I still don’t think we need to exaggerate how exotic. We’re not talking Star Wars here. Still there would clearly be features like NDEW directionality, and also apparently (from forensic data) an NPL unit to guide the plasma through. A previous commentator had compared the NDEW to firing a gun with no barrel, which is true in one sense, yet overlooks the key point that a fireball isn’t a solid cannonball and doesn’t behave like one. With plasma, you can make do with a duct or channel to guide it; an NPL barrel.
These are themes with variations, and there is no need to over-characterize the devices beyond what forensics can support. We end up with a sketch in pencil, but a pretty decent one I’d say. If Mr Unz has the stomach for it, perhaps Mr Gaffney could flesh out the forensic details in a future piece. For now, we can talk it through here in the comment section – within the limitations of this forum.
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Mr.Fact#,
Thank you so much for your erudite response. You seem like a true gentleman and a scholar (unlike PhDave). Much of the science you relate is beyond me. I was a good math and science student in high school, but in college organic chemistry and physics ended my aspirations in the science fields.
The only reason I addressed you directly is because of the note at the end of Mr. Gaffney’s article that mentions you:
(Note: This article would not have been possible without assistance from a fact-checker who cannot be named.)
I did not mean to open a can of worms or to embarrass you or Mr Gaffney.
A couple of years ago I met a retired New York City firefighter at the local senior recreation center in Colorado where I reside. He told me stories about 9/11 in which he participated. When I tried to share with him 9/11 truth-type material he would get very nervous and evasive.
As I mentioned, my uncle was Burton Richter, a Stanford particle physicist and director of SLAC. After I met Steven Jones and heard that he had studied under my uncle, I emailed him some 9/11 truth claims including those of Jones himself. My uncle was irate and extremely dismissive, comparable to the attitude of PhDave but without the vulgarity and acerbity.
I don’t believe 9/11 truth will ever become mainstream. We all will remain like a secret society huddled up with our evidence and suspicions but never reaching a societal tipping point. Besides the bad guys have learned to generate crises at lightning speed so as soon as you get a fix on one scam they are inundating us with yet another.
I’m not sure what you mean in your final comment about Christianity:
There’s a certain sloppiness about the debunkings and dismissals, and also an air of rudeness and arrogance. I’m thinking they, too, could benefit from taking some of Cromwell’s advice.
I’ve relied heavily on the evidence of this documentary which suggests strong historical credibility for the Gospel stories and the person of Jesus:
Finally, and I do not mean this disrespectfully, this sentence in your comment #19 sounds as though you’re not completely idiomatic with English. I would suspect you must be European, perhaps French German or Russian?
Although I was the one who took the word “exotic” in my mouth, I still don’t think we need to exaggerate how exotic.
• Replies: @Fact Checker -
Finally, and I do not mean this disrespectfully, this sentence in your comment #19 sounds as though you’re not completely idiomatic with English. I would suspect you must be European, perhaps French German or Russian?
Or maybe Japanese or Chinese? Or even Israeli! At any rate it’s not important, just a curiosity. Thanks for your efforts to uphold the truth. See this comment on another thread:
https://www.unz.com/runz/remembering-the-9-11-truth-movement/?showcomments#comment-6176035 -
8. Mr Gaffney in this introductory article has not been able to get into specifics about what forensic data and engineering considerations tell us about the devices employed to bring down the towers. I’ve hinted at some of it in my previous comment listing a “menu” of design themes for nuclear devices.
I lived in Israel for many years. Friends in the upper Galilee once showed me a military base encircled with radiation signs and fencing. They told me it was common knowledge that Israel had nuclear missiles and artillery based there pointed at Damascus. They also claimed Israel has nuclear land mines placed all over the Golan Heights. So I can believe your claims about exotic weapons, miniaturization etc.
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The essence of Project Azorian in this context is that the CIA saw the sinking of the Soviet Submarine K129 in 1968 in the Pacific to be an “opportunity”: if they could secretly raise it, reverse engineer the Soviet missiles, H-bombs and control systems on board, and then later use that knowledge to blackmail the Soviet leadership into causing the collapse of the USSR – which they did – without firing a shot, in December 1991.
While the CIA was doing all that from 1968 through ~1991, both the Viet Nam War and the Faked Moon Landings were CIA ‘covers’ for the Project Azorian efforts – i.e. created specifically to keep the world busily occupied looking somewhere ELSE so they would not be looking at what the CIA was doing with Project Azorian. They used Howard Hughes, the Glomar Explorer and “manganese nodules” also to good effect in that effort.
That’s the gross, public, “everybody-knows-that” side of it.
The minutia and far more important point is that in order to accomplish all that, the CIA was able to set-up numerous secret, world-class, state-of-the-art scientific and engineering labs to discover, create, and use cutting-edge micro-technologies in numerous scientific and engineering fields, and in fact, to gain monopolies in those fields to the point that they could easily pull-off, or assist, or lead, or counsel others on how to do the WTC Towers demolitions and other like projects – with aplomb.
(Stuxnet was a logical follow-on, later.)
Google Project Azorian on Wiki first, then read the 300 or more other books written on the subject, and one will begin to gain an understanding beyond that of most folks.
Few have the scientific or engineering background sufficient to gain the “aha”- moment from much of this.
But the connection between Project Azorian, the Nevada Test Site, Plowshare and 9/11 is tight.
The CIA’s job is to keep what it does secret; they have done a pretty good job with this one. The information is out there – it just takes an immense amount of digging. Most will quit the hunt before reaching the goal – that’s by design!
Essential References:
The Secret Team, L. Fletcher Prouty, Col.
UFO’s and the National Security State, Richard M. Dolan
The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee
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Thank you kindly. I thought your questions were good and that I’d spare Mr Gaffney some typing while I was at it. The remark about Cromwell was probably a little tongue-in-cheek, but still I think some of these physicists need to step down from the pedestal, I guess that was the point. On grammar errors, maybe it’s just because I lived too many years in Brooklyn, and wrote before having my morning cawfee.
So your prominent uncle was no 9/11 truther then. I remember contacting another prominent physicist specializing in nuclear weapons, to ask him to review the evidence for Nuclear 9/11. He’s the co-author of a manual on “The Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosives,” together with a notable Swiss physicist who regrettably passed away in 2009.
Now, this fellow responded to the effect that “If [my late great colleague] had had an inkling about 9/11 being a nuclear event, he would never have let go of it.” So I replied to him: “I’m sure that’s true about [your late great colleague], but how about yourself?” – and that was the last I heard from him.
As you can figure, this is a hot potato among them. They’re simply not going to look at the evidence. “Thyroid cancer? I’m no oncologist!” The hostile and mocking attitude has a ring of good old Archimedes: “Don’t disturb my circles!”
It’s all about protecting the circles, now carved in stone, and about defending the citadel. Nuclear physicists, it seems to me, have gradually drifted away from the limitless curiosity of science and toward becoming the intellectual gatekeepers of the nuclear security state.
It’s symbolic to me how the two types would co-habit in this one co-authorship, and how the scientist passed away while the apparatchik survives. It’s a sign of the times, but times keep changing and before you know it, that proverbial pendulum of the zeitgeist might swing back again. Time will tell.
• Replies: @Michael Korn -
Nuclear physicists, it seems to me, have gradually drifted away from the limitless curiosity of science and toward becoming the intellectual gatekeepers of the nuclear security state.
I suppose that’s been the case since the Manhattan Project, don’t you think? Although I suspect they are protecting their pocketbooks more than the nuclear security state. In modern day America nobody gives a damn about the collective. It’s a gigantic vulgar casino of grifting people. I think the reason Ron Unz is able to be so devoted to truth telling is because he has the financial security to avoid the mass culture of grift.
I’ve had a number of curious interactions with the nuclear weapons industry. In 2005, the last year I lived in Israel, I met Mordechai Vanunu, who was living in an Anglican Church in Palestinian East Jerusalem. I had read about him and was curious to meet him, especially since we both were Jewish converts to Christianity. I suggested to him that we become street evangelists and work in tandem and the Israelis might resent it so much that they would deport him. He was under all sorts of legal restrictions from interacting with foreigners and journalists, but to speak about Jesus to the Israeli public on the streets ostensibly was permitted to him. But unfortunately he thought I was a crank and completely ignored me. To his credit, he had suffered for many years in isolation and was understandably paranoid especially about Jews and Israelis.
The Seymour Hersh book, The Samson Option, revealed some interesting things about the family of a high school classmate of mine named Rufus Mark. His father, Hans Mark, was secretary for research and development with the US Air Force and based at the Naval Air station, Moffitt Field, in Mountain View, California. According to Hersh, Rufus’s grandfather, Herman Mark, who was a German Jewish scientist and refugee from Nazi Germany, played a crucial role in helping the Israelis acquire nuclear weapons.
You might find of interest this article about the new Oppenheimer movie by Yoichi Shimatsu, whose mother survived the Hiroshima nuclear bombing while she was pregnant with him:
https://rense.com/general97/Oppenheimer.phpOther Yoichi articles. Some of his ideas seem mind-blowingly bizarre but he’s a great writer, like a non-drug-addicted Hunter s Thompson:
https://rense.com/Datapages/yoichidat.htmMore and more I see the world we live in is a gigantic prison, with wardens and administrators on top, prison guards in the middle, and prison gangs on the bottom. Countries are simply aggregations of different kinds of Street gangs.
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FYI, .3-.4 kilotons = 300 -400 Tons of TNT — not pounds.
This is incorrect. In maths, the prefix “kilo” means “10 at the power of 3“, or “1,000” (one thousand).
So 3 to 4 kilotons is actually 3,000 to 4,000 tons of equivalent TNY. You are way, way off base, by a factor of 1 to 10. So may be a little modesty is required before stating things like:
Forget the wild-eyed estimates of the Russian Dmitri Khalezov (150 kilotons) and the Frenchman Francois Roby (80 kilotons). And yes, forget Heinz Pommer as well (100 kilotons).
Roby, Khalezov and Pommer have done an outstandingly courageous work, standing alone in the wilderness for the last decade. A little respect for them is the least any 9/11 truther can show.
• Replies: @Michael Korn, @Mark H. Gaffney -
I thought the nuclear theory was pretty well discredited in the comment thread a few weeks ago
No. What is truly discredited is your intellectual capacities.
• LOL: Michael Korn -
The Seymour Hersh book, The Samson Option, revealed some interesting things about the family of a high school classmate of mine named Rufus Mark. His father, Hans Mark, was secretary for research and development with the US Air Force and based at the Naval Air station, Moffitt Field, in Mountain View, California. According to Hersh, Rufus’s grandfather, Herman Mark, who was a German Jewish scientist and refugee from Nazi Germany, played a crucial role in helping the Israelis acquire nuclear weapons.
The book is now online: https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option
Back then, I attended Gunn High School, an elite public school in Palo Alto. The students were drawn from the families of Stanford faculty and Silicon Valley corporate executives. Most of my friends were Jewish or children of mixed marriages, usually a Jewish father professor and a Christian mother. Rufus Mark evinced zero Jewishness. I never would have guessed in a million years he was of Jewish heritage. He was an average student but more of a jock, a star on the high school basketball team. Today he is an oncologist:
https://www.ccswok.com/rufus-j-mark/Yet Hersh claims in his book that the grandfather, Herman, and possibly the father, Hans, were involved with the Zionists. Maybe Herman did it for money, but I am sure there was an ideological component, just like with Jonathan Pollard.
Check out this comment: https://www.unz.com/aanglin/serious-story-of-anne-frank-seriously-not-even-funny/#comment-6176246
The relative in question has almost zero Jewish identity. She does not follow the religion and has few Jewish friends. So I was surprised to see her intense anger about German anti-Jewish policies in the Hitler era. It strongly suggests that Jews have a hidden core identity that can become activated unexpectedly at any time in unpredictable ways. And Jews are so intermarried with the elites that there is no way to sequester them anymore. (It would be like discovering that Ron Unz is a commissioned officer in the IDF and works with Mossad to provide crucial information on anti-Jewish groups in the USA, something none of us could imagine possible.)I was shocked to discover that the actor who played the sinister SS official, Hans Landau, in the film Inglorious Basterds was married to a Jewess and has a daughter living in Israel married to an Orthodox rabbi!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGPwqVVaWjk
https://www.timesofisrael.com/waltz-unchained-for-jerusalem-wedding/
https://www.jpost.com/national-news/oscar-winning-actor-christoph-waltz-to-visit-israelWaltz has since done teshuva and married a German Christian:
Waltz has three children with his former wife, Jacqueline (née Rauch), a dance therapist originally from New York.[12][41] The two lived in London and their marriage lasted 17 years.[12][11] Waltz married his second wife, German costume designer Judith Holste, with whom he has a daughter. They divide their time between Berlin, Vienna and Los Angeles.[42][43]
Waltz speaks German, English, and French in Django Unchained, and also Italian in Inglourious Basterds.
Waltz was born in Vienna to a German father who applied for him to become a citizen of Germany after his birth.[44] He received Austrian citizenship in 2010, thus holding citizenships of both Austria and Germany, but considers the debate concerning his citizenship a “legal, citizenship law banality”, as he did not care about it at all[3] even though he had not previously been able to vote in Austria’s national elections. Asked whether he felt Viennese, he responded: “I was born in Vienna, grew up in Vienna, went to school in Vienna, graduated in Vienna, studied in Vienna, started acting in Vienna – and there would be a few further Viennese links. How much more Austrian do you want it?”[44]
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FYI, .3-.4 kilotons = 300 -400 Tons of TNT — not pounds.
This is incorrect. In maths, the prefix “kilo” means “10 at the power of 3“, or “1,000” (one thousand).
So 3 to 4 kilotons is actually 3,000 to 4,000 tons of equivalent TNY. You are way, way off base, by a factor of 1 to 10. So may be a little modesty is required before stating things like:
Dear Iris, this appears to be a very rare error on your part. Mark clearly cites 0.3-0.4 kilotons, not 3 to 4 kilotons.
• Thanks: Iris -
Iris,
Did you forget to insert the decimal point?I wrote .3-.4 kilotons, not 3-4 kilotons. It is very important we reach consensus on the numbers.
As for Khalezov, Roby and Pommer, their wild overestimates served to discredit the nuclear thesis. They have not helped our situation but actually hurt it.
This is why Ted Taylor’s expert views about small nukes are so important to this conversation.
Mark
• Replies: @Iris -
Again thanks, that’s interesting to hear about Israel’s nukes and even meeting Vanunu in person. Now, exciting though that is, I should like to keep things focused on Nuclear 9/11 – even though the whole history of the nuclear security state, and Israel’s nuclear program, are admittedly of considerable interest to 9/11 as well. But for now, let’s try to keep our focus on the World Trade Center. I will make a few remarks here on how I view Israel’s potential role in Nuclear 9/11.
It is no secret that Israel is a prime suspect in 9/11, and I’ve done some work on trying to find out how far the Israelis had reached by the turn of the century in their research and development of nuclear explosives. This is not a very easy task, as a lot of it is kept under wraps. Mr Gaffney has done in-depth research into this area of the proverbial “third temple” of Israel’s nukes, but even so, I suspect there is more to be learned about such things as “advanced” designs, or 3G nukes.
One valuable source in that regard is the 1987 Townsley report, which is not declassified in its entirety, but still provides a fair amount of insights into Israel’s participation in the SDIO, the international arm of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative a.k.a. “Star Wars”. I was struck by how far they had reached in high-powered laser technology already in the mid-1980s. I consider this an important piece of the jigsaw on device technology and proving feasibility.
https://www.irmep.org/cfp/DoD/071987_CTAIIANN.pdf#page=19What’s missing in the Townsley report, though, is an assessment of what nuclear spy Jonathan Pollard stole from America and transferred to Israel via his handler, the notoriouos Rafi Eitan, head in the 1980s of Israel’s nuclear spy agency Lekem. I’ve come to understand that Pollard had access to basically “everything” by way of US nuclear weapons technology, and for this reason I think it safe to assume that the Israelis by the turn of the century had internalized that and caught up on all fronts.
In other words, whatever the US had, the Israelis got through Pollard. Still theoretical results and blueprints are one thing, and making a real-world device is another – even if you have the blueprints. There are typically significant planning and gestation lags where nuclear technologies are concerned, but the intervening 15 years between Pollard and 9/11 should suffice for the Israelis to make whatever designs they desired to make.
Even if I can’t strictly prove it, my clear sense is that they were under no significant technological constraints, but could make anything 3G. Feasibility is thus highly plausible yet not strictly proven. What’s clear is that the forensic evidence from 9/11 strongly indicates 3G designs, and with peculiarities of the kind I’ve already pointed out in earlier comments, plus some more that I have yet to bring up.
All things considered, I hold it as a highly plausible and generally strong hypothesis that Israel could have manufactured the devices employed at the World Trade Center. But we’re getting ahead of things here, and I would rather like to return to the discussion of feasibility and proof of 9/11 being a nuclear event, and what the evidence says about such things as device design, emplacement, yield and effects, and all that. While it is good to keep the “whodunnit” question at the back of one’s mind, it is also best to keep it there until forensics have been sorted out.
• Replies: @Michael Korn -
I will try not to get too far afield. But I would assume that the Israelis have full ABC unconventional warfare technology and that their research is heavily enmeshed with comparable research in the West led by Jewish scientists. For example the Ness Tsiona site is known for developing bioweaponry and I figure they were involved with the Covid biowarfare attack on China and Iran, as Unz calls it.
https://rense.com/general96/10-years-after-fukushima.php
This article by Yoichi mentions what others have also written about concerning the theft of American nuclear warheads from the storage facility in Texas and sold off to the Israelis and others around the world. He claims that the Fukushima disaster was connected to this.I find the evidence you and Mark Gaffney provide persuasive and plausible but I am not interested in tediously building an ironclad case for nuclear demolition because we have no investigative authority and nobody in power is interested in what we think. The politicians serve the monied interests who are all profiting off of the perpetual wars and the national security regime that was implemented following the 9/11 false flag attack. So everything that’s written here is basically for our own private information and entertainment. So I will bow out of the conversation so as not to divert you from your main focus.
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Did you forget to insert the decimal point?
I did not forget it; I did not even see it, because this notation is incorrect. The scientific notation would be 0.3 to 0.4, and not .3- .4. For all I know, your “dot coming out of the blue” could be simply a bullet point.
A dot with no zero to its left means nothing in maths, and nobody in academia or even elementary school would ever write it like that. Anyway, you are completely wrong about the yields; you are in contradiction with Theodore Taylor himself, who stated at the end of “The Curve of Binding Energy” that the yield required to destroy one Tower would be in the order of 50 to 100 kT.
As for Khalezov, Roby and Pommer, their wild overestimates served to discredit the nuclear thesis. They have not helped our situation but actually hurt it.
With respect, Roby and Khalezov understood the nuclear demolition and explained it far better than you do. They have provided an indisputable explanation based on solid, proven, past experiments that nobody can challenge, and on a technology of underground nuclear detonations that has been:
– practised for decades
– executed over 1,500 times
– openly discussed at the United Nations
– and finally banned by an international treaty that came into force in 1990 under the CTBTWhereas you have provided a series of complete assumptions, based on the hypothetical existence of mythical mini fusion weapons for which you have no evidence.
(By the way, miniaturised fusion weapons were indeed invented in the US, but much, much later than 9/11, and were not available at the time. They came about following a random discovery on plasmas, made at the Sandia laboratories in 2003, formalised only in 2006).
Anyway, your hypothesis does not work for a reason I have explained many times over, including in your precedent article.
Any atmospheric detonation, “designer nuke” or otherwise, any detonation, causes a “sonic boom”, a big “Bang !” noise. It is impossible to have detonations without sonic booms, because the pressure shockwave provoked by the detonation will always compress the molecules present in the air, causing them to travel faster than sound, and causing this noise. Just check Wikipedia, or watch videos of controlled demolition with the original soundtrack. Or ask any physicist. There is no atmospheric explosion without sonic boom; it is impossible.And yet, one cannot hear any significant “Bang” when the Towers dustify, and then collapse, barely a muted noise. Their collapse is so unexpected, not preceded by any annunciating “Bang”, that we can hear all the public present shouting in disbelief when they come down.
No noise, no atmospheric explosions, no “designer nukes”.I am extremely sorry to read that you insult your fellow 9/11 Truthers, who have been courageous enough to state the truth of the WTC nuclear demolition for far longer than you did.
While you are entitled to your opinions, that is not the way to serve the cause of justice. Just do your research, write your articles, while others produce theirs, and let the readers make their own opinion. This is a far more honest and productive approach.• Replies: @Been_there_done_that -
And yet, one cannot hear any significant “Bang” when the Towers dustify, and then collapse, barely a muted noise.
This seems to be a weak argument. Were you in lower Manhattan when this occurred? If not, you are relying on camera microphones from television crews, studio sound reproduction, and recordings from television speakers. Moreover, since the explosive devices had been placed at a low point underneath the buildings, surrounded by concrete and rock, the audible sound would have exited upward through the elevator shaft and muffled.
Furthermore, there were multiple reports about explosions coming from the underground decks. What has not been addressed is the time lag between the triggering and the initial disintegration and collapses of the upper portions of the towers. Reliable seismographic recordings synchronized with video recordings would be a more liable source of information than what you heard or didn’t hear from your laptop speakers.
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Just remember, the guy who had the nerve to straight out call it “prison planet” was cancelled. I took his reporting as expressionism and never expected it to be real.
• Agree: Michael Korn -
The Deranged Human Mind. Sinister Self-Serving Architects of 9/11.
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“I would rather be judged on the merits of my arguments ”
“Potential energy is proportional to the third power of the length of the tower”
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What ever the case may be as far as the typyes of explosives tbat were used for the demilition, and who it was that actually was contracted to do the demolition, it does not exhonorate all of the conspirators in the 9/11 faked plane attacks, in which less than 3,000 people died that day, in the World Trade Towers and Pentagon that typically are filled with hundreds of thousands of people, who did not go to work that day because they knew that it was going to happen.
Perhaps it may have been the dancing Israelis that were contracted by the federal government, state of New York government, and New York City government, so the governments in this country are to blame. Governments around the world and in America frequently hire intelligence agencies from foreign countries to do illegal things, like they did by hiring Spanish intelligence agents to monitor Assange. They work in concert with each other This was a vast global conspiracy that was used for the purpose by governments around the world and in America to abolish the rights of citizens in their own countries, and in foreign countries, the same way that the German Nazis claimed that the Reischstag was destroyed by communist arsonists, even though it was completely in tact, but was used as an excuse to destroy the rights of Germans, regardless of political, or religious affiliation.
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Perhaps flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville was meant to hit Building 7, but the passengers got control of the cockpit. When Cheney found out, he got flight 93 blown out of the sky by a fighter jet so what little was left of the plane crashed at Shanksville.
The head of the forensic accounting team whose room at the Pentagon was vaporized , Brian Jack, was supposedly on the hijacked plane that hit HIS OWN office/roon where his team was that day. We are told he had business in California and henceforth got on the ill-fated jet that was hijacked. What are the chances that you take a flight, the flight gets hijacked by a suicide bomber who crashes the plane at YOUR office? 10 million-to-1 perhaps?
• Replies: @Michael Korn -
So when the conversations with McPhee turned to the World Trade Center (the two men revisit the issue a half dozen times in the book) Taylor went on record that about six grams of fissile material would be sufficient to take down each tower. That’s .2 ounces of bomb-grade material per tower, the mass equivalent of 1-2 sticks of chewing gum. Or, in TNT equivalents: .1 kiloton.
If there was anyone in the world who understood the concept of “critical mass”, that person would have been Ted Taylor. Even when he was 76 years old in 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass
So far as I understand the concept myself, sensible people simply don’t make atomic bombs weighing one or two pounds. Oh, in theory it’s possible to do so – there is an old book by Herman Kahn where he spoke of the theoretical possibility of using a few-days halflife isotope of Californium to make a pistol bullet-sized nuke which would have a 10 ton explosion.
Taylor’s wiki mentions him designing a 20 pound nuke which was never tested. Small wonder – it would have used an insanely expensive transuranium element like Cf to create something entirely useless.
When it becomes possible to build true “micro-nukes” by using non-fission initiators, I expect war is going to get an awful lot more nasty. I haven’t heard of that happening yet.
• Replies: @Fact Checker -
Mark…
Just because it’s POSSIBLE and I can’t disprove it, doesn’t make it PROOF OF ANYTHING.
The JFK guys are still arguing about frame #278 of the Zapruder film.
And the mob. And the jooooos. And the Cubans. And the CIA. And the Russians.
You know why?
Because these events are carried out with deliberate bread crumb trails leading to nowhere.
It keeps you real busy. I can tell by the length and breadth of the article.
Add in a few feds to point fingers and yell “FED” at anyone who doesn’t immediately endorse and push their “evidence” and after a while it really does not matter how close you are to the actual events.
That’s why the serious researchers stick to what they can prove.
The most effective 9/11 truth video ever on Youtube is James Corbett’s “9/11 in 5 minutes” video. It focuses entirely on the impossible official narrative. It went so viral so fast that he was a very early example of being ghosted on Youtube. Decades before Russell Brand, before Alex Jones, before anyone was James Corbett.
And he does not even come close to bothering with these unhinged, made-to-wander-the-desert-for-40-years, literally put out there toxic crap such as all of this ‘evidence.’
And for the record – I’m not even saying you’re wrong.
The problem is you cannot show this to normies.
There is actually a place and time for this kind of investigation – it’s at the bottom of a list of other priorities, such as the provable misprision of treason, and all the wide open doors like NORAD standing down for drills, the NRO office standing in the parking lot (instead of watching satellite feeds) because they ran a drill about planes hitting their building that day, and a million other things that are provable and we can take to the court of public opinion.
You’ll still be arguing about this when your grandchildren are sold to Islamic brothels.
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I noticed that some of U decided to have a Cultual Marxist Revolution, a Nazi Gestapo Revolution, a Technocracy Revolution, and a Genetic, age and income Demographic, Munchausen Syndrome Revolution, and that U decided to use high crimes, treason, constitutional rights violations, terrorism, mass murder, organized crime, Saul Alinsky Tactics, and illegal sabotage, hacking, vandalism, medical fraud, illegal spying, and gas-lighting for your underground revolutions.
Fine, have it your way!
Off to the Goulags, Concentration Camps, and Internment Camps tbat you have earned the rights to live in for your revolutionary efforts!
U are not worth sacrificing anything for, U are not worth suffering for, and U are unworthy of being forgiven!
The simplest solution is the most optimal. Use Occam’s Razor and slit your throats!
Kill yourselves and your own God damned fucking families! U did it! Your lives do not deserve to remain in tact! Who in the hell do U useless evil degenerate scumbags think U are?!
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Nope. Here’s the real deal:-
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You ask a shitload of great questions, which you then answer in fine fashion:
Sadly, just like the JFK assassination, we’ll never get the truth, because there was too much cover-up, for far too long, and now, they’ve filled the air with 20 years of gorilla dust, making the idea of getting to the real truth, utterly impossible.
Suffice it to say- 9/11 stinks! But most of the dupes believed it, so the next one will probably be even worse (and happen any day now), and it will sail right past the heads of the public once again.
Propaganda is a helluva drug!
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If/when the device went off a vertical spear of nuclear plasma exceeding millions of degrees would have shot up through the center of the building. When it hit the top of the elevator shaft it would have spread out and destroyed the tower from the top down, exactly what we observed
[Why “If/when?”] What about the TV tower, and the section it stood upon, which dropped and tilted off to one side? [Before disappearing into the pyroclastic clouds of pulverised concrete flooring, having had PETN threaded into the embedded wiring conduits, and the steel floor-pans inputting to the melted iron-rich microspheres, all hot enough to scorch cars and melt policemen’s guns?]
That TV tower not only survived, but is now on exhibition:
“Antenna from North Tower of World Trade Center on display in small Ohio village”
Nukular nutters, all.
No DEW, no dustification [of structural steel], no nukes. rgds
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Great article Mark – in keeping with the high standards you’ve set in the past in the pages of UR.
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Many learned scholars have made their contribution to uncover the truth.BUT,
As Putin correctly calls the US, the Empire of Lies,
WHAT DIFFERENCE WOULD THE TRUTH MAKE IN THE US AND THE WORLD?
Let us assume in the coming days insiders reveal all, including the Pentagon videos of a missile, not an airplane striking, THEN WHAT?
THE PERPS ARE WELL INSULATED BY A ZOMBIFIED SOCIETY AND WORLD. IT WILL BE BUSINESS AS USUAL. HENCE NO END TO AMERICAN PROXY WARS AND INTERFERENCE IN WORLD AFFAIRS. -
Your “key argument,” it appears, uses seismograph records to estimate building mass reductions, which you accept without reservation, but which I do not. You then accept the analysis that a minimum of 200 tons of TNT would be required to pulverize and expel the concrete (properly paced in drilled holes). There is no need to entertain the 2,000 ton figure–they were not taping charges to the bathroom walls. Why should the analysis calculating a 200 ton figure for explosives be accepted at face value?
For you and others, that analysis and other phenomena lead to the theory of a nuclear shaped charge sending a tightly constricted, unimaginably hot plasma beam heading unmolested up 1400 feet of elevator shaft at one thousand kilometers per second, which then spreads out, reflects downward, and does its dirty work. How could such a beam possibly behave that way? And how could the conspirators be so lucky as to hit upon this plan and carry it out perfectly, twice, with no prior testing? And how are they going to acquire these devices, by order using a Los Alamos Weapons Lab app?
I tend to emphasize the view of John Skilling, head structural engineer in the building of the towers, who opined in 1993 that a top building demolition expert could bring the towers down. At this point I can imagine advanced conventional explosives being put to use, but not nuclear kinetic energy weapons.
Thank you for the discussion and please forgive me if I misconstrued any of your arguments. Delving into things like nuclear shaped charges, nuclear directed energy weapons, Projects Orion and Prometheus,etc., is most interesting. I particularly liked the article I ran across titled “The Nuclear Spear: Casaba Howitzer” dated Jul 21, 2018 in medium.com by ToughSF.
• Replies: @Fact Checker -
Nuts are gonna nuke, like the poor they will always be with us. What with unlimited CIA propaganda dosh and a large population of poorly educated persons of below average intelligence one cannot expect much else I suppose.
Why doesn’t the ‘plasma’ thingie shooting up the elevator shaft come out the top and keep going several miles into the air? Why doesn’t the ‘plasma’ thingie at a temperature of millions of degrees create an instant shock wave of superheated compressed air that blows out all the windows in the building, not to mention melt the elevator shaft columns? Why, the nuke was especially tailored so that this would not happen of course!
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Then, there is the Pentagon hoax ….. An invisible jumbo jet, skimmed the lawn after the most improbable air maneuver ever, then totally vaporized on impact, leaving no debris, and causing a hole no bigger than the fuselage, while the wings apparently vaporized as well?
The plane that impacted with the Pentagon (a Raytheon owned and modified Douglas A-3 Skywarrior), was very visible indeed, and one or two honest witnesses described it more or less accurately.( ie: saying it appeared like a ‘small passenger jet’).
As for the ‘no plane debris’ claim of yours, of course the official USG narrative claims a Boeing 757 impacted with the Pentagon, so they’ll never admit the reality that A-3 Skywarrior components were found and positively identified.
I suggest you open up the link below and educate yourself on this matter:http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/mitchell/inside.job.htm
Be sure to click onto all the links within it – especially the first link containing the words (Pentagon, crane, lifting, parts).
As those words imply, you’ll see some major body sections of the A-3 Skywarrior being suspended from a crane, which were retrieved from within the Pentagon after the impact (which is in the background of the photo).As for your claim about the ‘most improbable manoeuvre’, said manoeuvre was impossible for a wide bodied commercial aircraft, but presented no problem whatsoever for the A-3 Skywarrior.
In relation to this passage from the link I posted above:
The Boeing 757 seen by many eyewitnesses was timed to fly over the Pentagon at precisely the moment of the A-3’s impact.
It landed at National, into the waiting arms of 94 ground crew who had infiltrated Dulles and National airports.…. you can learn more about the REAL Boeing 757 that did a ‘flyover’ over the Pentagon that day, in its capacity as a decoy, if you click onto the link below to a comment of mine posted in another UR thread in recent days:
https://www.unz.com/runz/remembering-the-9-11-truth-movement/?showcomments#comment-6169197
Be sure to watch all the videos in that comment, demonstrating witness testimony of those who observed a REAL 757 Boeing plane that was involved as a diversion.
Mr Rock-Man, your comment suggests a very superficial understanding of what really went on during the 9/11 False Flag and is indicative of the fact that you’ve done precious little research into the event.
I suggest you get cracking, because there is much ground for you to cover. -
Mark,
We had some email correspondence, actually not just between the two of us, but it was a kind of thread with various participants and I was added to the recipients.
I asked you several times the same question but somehow could never get a straight answer. This question:
In your opinion are the plane crash videos shown on 9/11 real or fake?
I’d appreciate an answer to that. After all, the question does admit a “yes” or “no”.
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Correcting my previous sentence:
Reliable seismographic recordings synchronized with video recordings would be a more liable source of information than what you heard or didn’t hear from your laptop speakers.
It should read “reliable” instead of “liable“.
To provide more information about the topic of sonic booms that you had brought up:
Sonic boom from Wikipedia:
The energy range of sonic boom is concentrated in the 0.1–100 hertz frequency range that is considerably below that of subsonic aircraft, gunfire and most industrial noise. Duration of sonic boom is brief; less than a second, 100 milliseconds (0.1 second) for most fighter-sized aircraft and 500 milliseconds for the space shuttle or Concorde jetliner.
Additional quotes from the Videomaker web site:
The 20Hz to 80Hz range of the audio spectrum is the realm of subwoofers, for example, a kick drum’s punch.
…
Hi-pass filters set a cutoff frequency; anything above is allowed to pass through, anything below is cut or reduced.
…
You want to preserve as much bandwidth as possible. Cutting off frequencies below 120 or 80Hz reduces bandwidth costs by eliminating low-level sounds in that range.This is why I asked if you were present in lower Manhattan on that particular morning. People likely felt the explosion in their rib cage, part of the frequency range would below the audible threshold of roughly 16 Hz.
Even if some of the lower frequency ranges had been recorded by the microphones used then, they would likely have been suppressed along the way, during the editing and compression process, including sampling rate. And if all that had not been the case, you would need a good sound system for playback, including a subwoofer.
Lastly, perhaps you could explain why you have even brought up the issue. You seem to be convinced that an explosive device with a much higher nominal yield was deployed. This would likely explain the molten rock that was observed underground years later, especially near where Building 4 had been, the so-called “ice-age pothole” that was not evident during the 1960s when the complex was built. Yet such a device should have created an even greater sonic boom than a small nuclear device that the author of this piece now promulgates as a more likely source of the energy that was in evidence. If you couldn’t hear a sonic boom under the presumption of an explosive report from a large device, why would you then complain that you couldn’t hear a sonic boom for an allegedly much smaller device?
In any case, the discussion should not get bogged down on audio equipment issues but delve more into the interpretation of documented seismographic data. I hope that the author or Fact Checker might provide more information about this. Shouldn’t it be possible to draw inferences about the nominal yield and depth placement of the devices when examining the decay rate of the thermal data, including imagery from satellites, to corroborate with the theory and seismograph recordings?
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The two-stage demolition model presented here explains two otherwise mysterious observations.
1) At the moment the hypothetical nukes detonated initiating the collapses of the Towers, witnesses were startled and terrified by massive, muffled explosions or earthquake-style jolts. As I recall, cameras on tripods wobbled, handheld cameras jerked, and network footage shows news anchors and others reacting and talking about “a huge explosion” etc. seconds before they turn and run from the exploding/collapsing buildings.
2) The top section of the South Tower began leaning as if it were going to topple off the intact bottom section, but before it could topple it suddenly seemed to disintegrate. Something had instantaneously pulverized it such that it was no longer a structurally coherent building section.
MG: “Although conventional explosives alone certainly could have demolished the twin towers, nukes were essential to pulverize the top third of each building. “
This “just” in:
All of the tower “collapse” sequences [WTC’s 1, 2 and even building 7] are 100% CGI.
See “CGI collapse footage”:
https://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?t=802
So all depictions of the tower collapses of WTC’s 1 and 2 depicting the top third of either being “pulverized” are pure CGI fabrications as well.
More to the point, the endless arguments here and elsewhere over which particular demolition methodology was actually used [ nukes, directed energy, dynamite] is a [deliberate?] time wasting distraction.
Its time to move on from such silly distractions. At this point in time, anyone with even half a lick of sense already understands that the official narrative is just pure lies stacked upon lies.
And in any case, _nothing_ about actual demolition methodology can ever be deduced from examining 100% fake, CGI video sequences!
Regards, onebornfree
https://onebornfrees911researchreview.blogspot.com/
They needed something significantly more brazen than merely shooting a popular US President in the head, during the middle of a parade, on film.
So, yea, detonating nuclear devices, in what was arguably America’s most powerful city, on live TV, that would do the trick.
The only question remaining is how the Muslim terrorists got hold of such sophisticated devices? They must have transported them on the planes and tossed them out the windows once the planes penetrated the thin walls of the buildings.
If only we could identify who might have benefitted from all of this. Cui bono, I think they phrase it.
@roonaldo
You didn’t misrepresent my arguments in your previous comment, but you’re definitely misrepresenting them now, and I think deliberately. That’s no way to carry on a constructive discussion. What you did the last time was simply disregard the key argument, which is also an ugly stunt, and it comes as no surprise that you’re trying it again here.
The argument was, a demolition job that causes the towers to crumble the way they did cannot be rigged with conventional explosives as long as the towers are in use. If the towers had been decomissioned, then that’s a different matter. You could then drill that myriad of holes in the concrete slabs, stick in the dynamite, wire it and fire away. It’s clunky in the extreme, but it could be done. Not so while the towers were still in use.
If you want to advance your own interpretation of the seismograms, feel free to do so, and I’ll take a look at what you’ve got. I did not primarily refer to other people’s studies but to my own decomposition of seismic activity as per the seismograms. It’s kind of a “long story” that’s not terribly well suited for a comment section, but I still wanted to mention some key results.
Your objections on the plasma dynamics front don’t come across as very serious either. It is a matter of course that one can engineer such factors as aperture, ejection speed, and the like. The Casaba-Howitzer was a theoretical idea back in the 1950s about ejecting plasma at very high velocities, which obviously would not work for 9/11.
However, if you look at the dynamics of an ordinary fireball in above-ground tests, you’ll find the speed with which the fireball rises depends primarily on yield and height of burst. To that we must add the configuration of the detonation pit when considering underground shots in semi-open pits or shafts.
The point is, there are several parameters that can be adjusted to achieve a “Goldilocks” velocity for the purpose, and also to achieve the desired aperture for the plasma to travel inside the 10 x 10 feet elevator shaft the distance from pit to top. In addition to that, there will also be air compression between fireball and roof retarding and eventually halting it.
To engineer this kind of shot, one would need to fine-tune all these aspects. Do we need to do that in order to prove feasibility? I don’t think so. It’s pretty clear that it’s doable, and if it’s doable, decent engineers will figure out how to do it. What’s important is the contention that you can fire a nuke underground and have it eject the plasma to the top and let it do its work up there.
Somebody in another comment brought up the television mast on top of the North Tower, which tilted to the south and then fell off. Many people seem to think that a nuclear plasma would evaporate everything, including the steel. More realistically, thinner steel plate might evaporate, along with most furniture and fixtures, while thicker steel might heat up to the point of bending and giving way. Above all, the heat from the fireball would embrittle the concrete, sharply reducing the amount of energy consumed in the process of mechanically pulverising it.
I bring that up as it ties in with Canadian nuclear engineer Frank Greening’s 2006 paper, in which he produced the figure 600 tons of TNT for explosively pulverising all the concrete in one tower to the degree of fineness that was observed on 9/11. If it takes 600 tons to do the whole tower, then the top third would take about 200 tons; that’s how I arrived at that number. Nobody here has asked you to take anything at face value, but you can check Greening’s paper with further references for yourself, here: http://www.911myths.com/WTCONC1.pdf#page=19
How much radiation is caused from all the Fracking since they use a mini type nuke. ?
The USG doesn’t tell the people what the Rads are in all the different locations – Bob Nichols website does.
Explain 200 floors of concrete, red iron and other building materials – totally missing from the debris pile.
Only an imbecile would think he could get any Justice from the Southern US District Court in New York. It’s Little Israel !
@Kevin Barrett
As Iris writes, the experiment with ‘nukes in the basement’ has been done:
But IF ‘uncontained’ THEN something very much like this is what is guaranteed [Princeton paper] would occur:
“Get an ‘orse!”
The perps *must* have used ‘conventional methods’ *known* to work [= *nothing* ‘experimental’], even if at supercharged = massive ‘overkill’ magnitudes [explains ‘residual heat.’] rgds
@Zachary Smith
What Mr Gaffney, as well as Ted Taylor himself, are referring to is the amount of fissile fuel burned in the detonation, not to the critical mass required to enable the chain reaction. For every kilogram of fissile material consumed (undergoing fission), about 18 kilotons of yield will be obtained. If you scale that down to the low yields relevant to the World Trade Center, you’ll end up with the very small figures quoted by Mr Gaffney.
There are various ways to calculate the yield required for the Twin Towers demolition job. Ted Taylor is just using the World Trade Center colloquially to illustrate unrelated points, and says that 100 tons (0.1 kiloton) would be enough to bring down a tower. That’s undoubtedly true, but would not amount to a controlled demolition; it would rather represent a chaotic “truck bomb in the garage” type of attack, a nuclear version of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
If we instead consider a controlled demolition of the kind proposed in Mr Gaffney’s article, the yield would need to be raised to about 300-400 tons (0.3-0.4 kilotons) per tower. This would generate about 15-20 grams of fission products per tower, or 30-40 grams in total, the lion’s share of which would be contained within the cordoned-off perimeter surrounding the WTC site.
Note that only burned fuel will produce such “fallout” in the form of fission products; the rest of the fissile fuel will not contribute to that. Also, for environmental reasons, uranium is preferred to plutonium for civilian engineering purposes, viz Plowshare nukes. Forensically, therefore, we should expect to detect in the ash and dust some uranium but no plutonium, along with other materials from which the device was made. In this introductory overview, Mr Gaffney did not go into the details of these forensics, but I thought I should at least hint at it here in the comment section.
“Although conventional explosives alone certainly could have demolished the twin towers, nukes were essential to pulverize the top third of each building.”
I must be missing something. The blast itself did NOT pulverize the top third of the towers. The towers stood for some time after the impact (supposed) of the planes. People were jumping to their death from the observation deck. If the blast had pulverized the top third of the towers the people would have been pulverized too.
Let me clarify that.
The upper third of the towers obviously were NOT pulverized.
Did the author say that the hypothetical blast occured some time AFTER the impact of the planes?
I’ve got to read the entire article again LOL.
Rambling nonsense.
@Kevin Barrett
Your observations are right on the mark, Mr Barrett. The big puzzle with the Twin Towers consists of two seemingly contradictory facts, namely (1) that huge detonations took place underneath the towers, but (2) the towers crumbled from the top and down. Reconciling (1) and (2) becomes impossible without invoking nuclear. People are reluctant to invoke nuclear as it strains credulity, at least on the face of it. But this is a psychological phenomenon, which is largely based in ignorance.
The simple fact of the matter is, most people don’t know anything much about nukes, let alone nuclear landmines and Plowshare-type designer nukes. Their frame of reference is the typical Hiroshima-Nagasaki airdrop, with a huge fireball and mushroom cloud, and resulting in a flattened city. Beyond that, they typically only have the vaguest notions about even underground shots, let alone low-yield devices and advanced designs.
If the towers were brought down conventionally, or with thermite for that matter, there would be no such massive underground detonations as those that registered on 9/11. So conventional fails to explain (1), and there are also several other pieces of forensic evidence which are only consistent with nuclear, but which conventional cannot explain. Thyroid cancer is a case in point, but there are also certain patterns in the USGS dust samples data which support nuclear. In addition to that, it’s impossible to work out the energy balance of the collapses – to get the sources and uses of energy to balance out – without invoking a nuclear-size external energy source.
The main substantive objection to nuclear has always been (2), that the nukes must be fired underground while the towers collapsed from the top and down. To my mind, that’s just a misconception, as nuclear devices can be designed and emplaced in a way that brings about precisely that result. The trick is to have a “directional” effect so that the plasma is ejected mainly in one particular direction from the device when fired. We know this can be done, and although there is fine print to add on how to go about this, it’s pretty clear from openly available sources that it could be done. Blueprints on the sump pits also support the feasibility of this design.
As to the two-stage demolition, Ansgar Schneider’s paper (and video presentation) on the S-shaped collapse curve supports this too. The two stages overlap but are not done entirely continuously, so show up as an inflection in the measured collapse curve. This is consistent with nuking the top part while taking down the remaining stumps conventionally, by cutting steel with ordinary shaped charges. The stumps could also be done with thermitic charges, although quite honestly, I fail to see the point in that. I would not count the S-curve per se as proof of nuclear, but it is definitely consistent with the two-stage “nuclear top, conventional stumps” demolition scheme proposed by Mr Gaffney in this article.
@Robertson
To add to the absurdity of this scenario, Ron’s friend David Miller, who trashes the 9/11 truth movement on a previous Mark Gaffney article on this site, claims that Brian Jack was his personal friend!
Has anybody taken a closer look study at all of the automobiles. And to see the same kind of destruction of autos in Hawaii is shocking?
@roonaldo
As the author pointed out, you did get the units wrong. However, I like your comment and think it relevant to the 911 aspect of the article.
The history of the Plowshare (Ploughshare) project part of the article is interesting.
At school in Singapore, one of our teachers mentioned one of the proposed projects, many years later. The idea had been to use atomic bombs to make a canal through the isthmus of the Malayan Peninsula.
I have also read of the Plowshare-related bomb-tests in Alaska, they were all above-ground.
The article seems to veer from somewhat interesting history, through truth (e.g. the utility of boron for neutron absorption), to utter speculation (I know that some fission can be obtained with a small mass, but it fizzles out).
Building 7 was clearly a professional demolition for insurance money, no nukes, as for the twin towers, it seems similar, except that the jets did hit them, and did start extensive fires. Internal detonation setups to add to the destruction seem almost certain.
All of the mini-nuke claims seem simply to be a nonsensical diversion.