DDP Newsletter January 2019 Vol. XXXV, No. 1
What most people have seen of Antifa is an occasional street demonstration, or a “woke” group of college students hanging out in coffee shops. In North Carolina, Antifa helped in the attack on memorials such as Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier. But beneath the theater of “protests” and occasional violent outbursts is a fairly high level of organization and funding by outside groups that are skilled at directing the masses, with the goal of sedition, not reforms.
One sign of the level of organization and seriousness is the presence of street medics. Two were photographed by cell phone at a recent demonstration in Chapel Hill, displaying red crosses made from tape. The beginning of the Antifa street medics can be traced to the informal “action medics” who were supporting anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and similar leftist riots in 1960s. Antifa groups on college campuses, called “collectives,” have special “health collectives,” which are groups of individuals with various levels of medical training (from laymen who received some basic life support training, through paramedics and nurses to medical doctors). Most of those “medics” have had some brushes with law enforcement, having previously served as regular Antifa street fighters. Therefore, they are well acquainted with their “urban battlefields.” In some places, Antifa medics congregate around state-sponsored “Harm Reduction Organizations,” where they can tap into the professional resources of official medicine.
Several emergency medical manuals are available on the street or on the internet, as at www.PaperRevolution.org/Street-Medic-Guide. This guide contains some fairly good layman’s medical advice. Anticipating police action, it seems to have adapted a military pepper-spray neutralization protocol. The recipe for LAW (liquid antacid and water) is a 50:50 mixture of water and an antacid containing either magnesium hydroxide or aluminum hydroxide. A small amount is applied to affected areas, including the eyes. Milk can be used as a stopgap in a tear-gas or pepper-spray attack.
There are other potential sources of chaos. Ordinary people might be driven to the streets if sufficiently oppressed as by a Green New Deal—like workers in France affected by a fuel tax hike. In response to the “Yellow Vest” demonstrations, the French government with EU support deployed troops in riot gear, using water cannons, tear gas, and other generally nonlethal weapons. One protester lost an eye, and another a hand. Disabled persons in wheelchairs were tear-gassed at short range. As seen in internet video footage (mainstream media coverage has been sparse), the streets of Paris at times have resembled a war zone (https://tinyurl.com/yxk93lxk). At the time of this writing in mid-May, the Yellow Vest protests were in their 27th weekend, with about 2,500 turning out in Nantes and Lyon, according to rt.com. Largely peaceful protests were disrupted when some black-hooded demonstrators hurled bottles at police officers and smashed shop windows in Nantes (https://tinyurl.com/y3bqxuhz).
Terrorist attacks are unabating worldwide. In case violence finds you, you may want to upgrade your emergency kit—see suggestions in the Street Medic Guide.
DEFENSE UPDATES
Remember the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) from the Reagan Administration? (Civil Defense Perspectives May 1990 and May 1991, physiciansforcivildefense.org, and DDP Newsletter July 1991 and July 2000, ddponline.org)? The idea is back: “U.S. defenses look to thwart missiles early” (Science 1/25/19). Reporter Gabriel Popkin reminds us that the idea “was derided as ‘Star Wars,’” and asserted that it would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At the time, space-based kinetic-kill boost-phase interceptors called Brilliant Pebbles, made from off-the-shelf technology, were estimated to cost $5 billion. The idea was buried, and as Popkin notes, “the primary U.S. missile defense strategy is still deterrence.”
As we already knew, “US unprepared for nuclear attack: Growing threat from North Korea rattles scientists who study disasters and public health” (Nature 8/30/18). Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. preparedness efforts for a nuclear strike have focused on a terrorist strike with an improvised 1-KT weapon or a “dirty bomb.” But North Korea is thought to possess advanced thermonuclear weapons—each more than 180 KT. The U.S. response: ‘We can’t deal with this,” said Cham Dallas, a public-health researcher at the University of Georgia in Athens. He reports that more than half of emergency medical workers in the U.S. and Japan have no training in treating radiation victims.
Most first responders have no training in dealing with a nuclear attack, states Stephen Jones (search for “roadman911” on youtube.com for video of the 2009 effort to equip Arizona first responders). Dallas found that 33% of medical professionals would not be willing to enter a fallout zone (ibid.). They lack appropriate radiation-monitoring equipment and have been taught that no radiation dose is safe.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. has led the world in arms control efforts, and its nuclear weapons stockpile has been drawn down 85% from its Cold War high. But the strategic threat has only gotten worse. Russia and China continue to expand the size and sophistication of their nuclear forces. The average age of U.S. warheads is 26.62 years. “Most of the nation’s nuclear delivery systems, built in the 1980s and prior, will reach their end-of-service life in the 2025-2035 timeframe and cannot be sustained further. If not recapitalized, these forces will age into obsolescence.” Russia has about 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons of more than a dozen different types—including nuclear air and missile defenses—while the U.S. retains a small number of just one type—the B61 nuclear gravity bomb.
The DOD document has no mention of strategic or civil defense, but states on p 1: “NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS THE BEDROCK OF U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY.” The danger of losing it altogether in about 10 years is in small print on p 3 (https://tinyurl.com/y4jdrng3).
“The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons. As a result, Russia overcome the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor” (PravdaReport 11/13/2014, https://tinyurl.com/y3rvadsp).
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