THE POLIKARPOV PO-2 - A FRAGILE LITTLE KNIFE THAT WON GUN FIGHTS

© Darius A Irani, 2024

A Chequered Career

Nikolai Polikarpov was born on June 9, 1892, in the Livensky District in Russia. His father was the village priest, and he started his own studies in a Seminary before becoming enamored of aviation and switching to the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University, graduating in 1911. As an engineer he was a rarity in that he remained in Russia after the revolution. He would be a significant contributor to the early Russian aircraft of the 1920s, including the U-2 "crop duster," a tandem two-seater biplane designed in 1927 - 1928.

In 1928 he and his team were given an impossible task - to design a new all-wood fighter (the I-6) in an unrealistic timescale. In Stalin's demented mind their failure was no less than an act of treason and in October 1929 Polikarpov and his entire team of almost 450 staff were sentenced to death. Someone must have pointed out to Stalin that he had already executed too many engineers, and loosing so many more might cripple the Russian aircraft industry. Necessity prevailed, and his sentence was changed to 10 years of forced labor. During this time his team would successfully design the I-5, for which success he would be granted amnesty in 1931.

He went on to design the I-16 in 1933 and the I-15 in 1934. The I-16 was a revolutionary design. It was the first low-wing cantilever monoplane with a fully enclosed cockpit and retractable landing gear. It would see action against the Japanese in China, against the Finns in Karelia, and would perform well for the Spanish Republic against the nationalist forces of Franco but would eventually be outclassed by the Me 109. Still, both of them were the main Russian fighters in 1941 and would buy the Russians valuable time to rebuild their aircraft industry which was destroyed at the start of Operation Barbarossa.

For his many innovative designs and achievements, Polikarpov was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1935, and the Order of the Red Star in 1936. In 1939, he would suffer another setback when his design bureau was dismantled while he was on a trip to Germany. He died of stomach cancer on 30 July 1944.

The Little Knife

By the mid-thirties, Polikarpov would be recognized for his inventive designs, but in 1927 he was just starting out as a designer. He had only designed two earlier aircraft when he decided to upgrade the U-1 trainer and called it the U-2 (which would be renamed the PO-2 after his death.) Although it was never intended to, the PO-2 would go on to become a quintessential multi-role light bomber/ground attack/liaison aircraft that would distinguish itself in two international conflicts. It is thought that as many as 40,000 variants were manufactured up to 1960, making it the most produced biplane in history!

It is a tandem two-seat bi-plane, best described as reliable and uncomplicated. Ideal as a trainer and for short field operations. It is powered by a Shvetsov M-11D, 5 cylinder, air-cooled radial engine generating 99hp. With a max speed of 94mph and cruising at an exhilarating 68mph it wasn’t going to impress anyone, especially when in 1927 the contenders for the Schneider trophy were within spitting range of 300mph. But then, it was never intended to impress anyone and would have faded into obscurity like many of its contemporaries if Germany had not invaded Russia.

It has no brakes so taxying and stopping in short fields can be exciting. A pilot who flew it out of the Shuttleworth collection once described it as a big heavy girl with little fineness. With the bomber modifications it was quite heavy and probably required rough handling, but its slow speed allowed it to make very tight turns.

A Band of Sisters

Between the wars, Russia had an active civilian aviation program. There were an abundance of clubs and schools where both men and women had learnt to fly and navigate. Prominent among them was Mariana Roskova. Besides her accomplishments as a long-distance flyer, she had gained enormous popularity for once surviving for 10 days in the Siberian outback.

After the outbreak of war, many young girls with flying skills wrote to Mariana asking how they could contribute to the war effort. She used her influence to approach Stalin with the idea of forming all women aviation regiments. Up to then women had been banned from combat duty. However, the German invasion was bleeding Russia’s manpower, and the propaganda value of such a formation was too tempting. In October of 1941 Stalin approved the creation of three, all women, aerial regiments: the 586 was a fighter regiment; the 587 a day bomber regiment; and the 588 became a night bomber regiment. Each regiment comprised about 400 women with ages between 17 and 26 years old. They were resented by the men they worked alongside with, treated with derision, and equipped with ill-fitting clothing and outdated equipment, which might explain why the venerable PO-2 was the 588’s designated workhorse.

If it Sounds Like a Broom, and Flies Like a Broom, the Pilot Must be a ....

The PO-2’s journey from 2 place trainer/crop duster to weapon of war began in September 1941. During the defense of Odessa, a civilian PO-2 piloted by Pyotr Bevz dropped bombs on the besieging German guns. Although it made no difference to the outcome of that battle, a germ of a possibility took root. Could the PO-2 be used as a light short-range bomber?

Some modifications were necessary, including bomb carriers beneath the lower wing, some armor plating to protect the pilot and observer, and a rear facing 7.62mm machine gun in the observer's cockpit. These were approved by Polikarpov, and the light bomber variant was created. Not a lot could be done about its inherent frailty. A handful of tracer rounds was enough to set its wood and fabric fuselage ablaze earning it the Russian nickname ‘Kerosene lantern’ (‘it burned like a box of matches’). So, flying around in daytime was not an option, and the modified PO-2 was assigned to the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

With a bomb load of about 700 pounds, the little PO-2 was not going to settle even an argument, least of all a battle or the war. However, it would have a completely unexpected effect on the German front-line troops. A typical mission would start at a field near the frontlines. The Russian women would take off after dark in formations of 2 or 3 PO-2s and fly at tree top level until they got to the German lines. One of them would then deliberately draw the German’s attention allowing the others to climb to a suitable altitude, cut their engines, glide down on the unsuspecting Germans, drop their bombs and be gone, swallowed up in the night.

The Germans could not get much rest! They would get little or no warning. All they heard was the whistle of the wind through the rigging of the PO-2, and then the bombs would fall. It was galling enough that a bunch of women were making their lives miserable, doubly so because they could not do much about it. It was very hard to find a PO-2 skimming the trees in the dark. Even years later, despite the advent of airborne radar, the wood and fabric construction did not lend itself to detection. If found, it was even harder to get a bead on them. The max speed of the PO-2 was less than the stall speed of the Me 109. If the PO-2 was ambling along at its cruise speed, the Germans would barely get it in their sights before they flew right past it. It was so challenging that any German pilot who shot down a PO-2 was automatically awarded the Iron Cross.

Somehow, the frustrated and sleep deprived Germans became convinced that the sound of the gliding PO-2 was exactly that of a witch riding on her broom, and the legend of die Nachthexen (The Night Witches) was born. Far from being offended, the Russians welcomed the moniker, and it stuck. The regiment flew its first mission on June 28, 1942, and would see action from the Ukraine to the bitter end in Berlin. At its peak it comprised about 40 2-person flight crews who would display incredible stamina and bravery.

Each mission would last between 45 minutes to an hour. Altogether they would fly over 23 thousand of them. Some of the crews flew over 800 missions, and one pair spent a long Russian winter night flying an incredible 18 missions (Yekaterina Ryabova and Nadezhda Popova). The women did not even leave the cockpit, they just sat there sipping tea while the PO-2 was re-armed and re-fueled.

Flying in an open cockpit during the brutal Russian winters was demanding and dangerous. Bare hands would freeze to any metal they touched. They flew so low that a parachute would have no time to deploy, so they were not used till very late in the war. They flew from fields very close to the front lines and used no radios. Sometimes the Germans would recapture the field they had taken off from, which resulted in a very unwelcome surprise when they tried to land. The PO-2 was often described as a coffin with wings. Still, the witches would drop over 3,000 tons of bombs and 26 thousand incendiary shells.

Eighteen pilots and six navigators were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, and collectively they would emerge as the most highly decorated female unit in the Soviet Air Force. Their founder, Raskova, would die in 1943 on her way to the front. Another 30 would die during the war. Their last flight was on May 4, 1945, three days before Germany surrendered, and less than 40 miles from Berlin. Ironically, they and the PO-2 were excluded from the big victory parade because the PO-2 was supposedly too slow.

Molon Labe

Apparently, the end of World War II was not the end for the PO-2. Half a world away a new war and a new enemy put it back to work. The North Koreans had quite a few of them and caused a lot of damage to UN bases in night raids like those of the witches. On one raid a single PO-2 dropped fragmentation bombs on a line of P-51 Mustangs damaging eleven of them. Three of them were so badly damaged that they were later destroyed. In mid-June 1951, Suwon Air Base was attacked by a pair of PO-2s. One F-86 Sabre was set afire and eight others were damaged. Only quick action by the ground crews prevented the situation from getting out of control. The UN forces had their own nick name for the PO-2: Bed check Charlie. The difficulties in finding and destroying the PO-2 had not diminished. If anything, the newer Jet Fighters had an even harder time slowing down to a suitable interception speed. U.S. Korean war veteran Leo Fournier summed it up in his memoirs: “... no one could get at him. He just flew too low and too slow...”

However, it was not all one sided. There are two recorded instances where American pilots brought down PO-2s. On June 16,1953 a USMC AD-4 piloted by Major George Linnemeier with Vernon Kramer in the CWO seat shot down a PO-2. Now retired, Col. Richard Heyman also brought one down in his A-26 Invader. The little PO-2 wasn’t without its own victories. A pilot in a Lockheed F-94 Starfire was tempted to go after one and tried to slow down to match its speed. The stall speed of the F-94 is about 130mph so it's not hard to guess how that ended. This would earn the PO-2 the unique distinction of being the only biplane credited with downing a modern jet fighter. Leonidis’ ghost is probably chuckling over that one.

NOTES:

The success of the Night Witches prompted the Germans to create their own harassment units using their equally obsolete 1930s open cockpit biplanes!

The Soviets were well aware of the consequences of sleep deprivation. It was frequently used by their secret police against political prisoners.

The Shevtsov was eventually upgraded to 125 HP. Still, when fully loaded with bombs, ammo and two crew members its takeoff weight was close to 3,000 pounds and it would be a struggle to cruise faster than 60mph.

Some sources say that the witches cut their engines and others that they idled them. Could one hear the sound of the wind in the rigging if the engine was idling – not sure! However, the PO-2 had no electric starter – starting on the ground requiring compressed air. So, starting mid-air would require them to get the prop windmilling in a dive.

Sabaton is a Swedish heavy metal band that focus on wars and acts of heroism. The have written a stirring tribute to the Night Witches. It is available on YouTube and is worth listening to:

“...Canvas wings of death

prepare to meet your fate

Night bomber Regiment.

588...”

NATURE WILL SURVIVE - PART 1. A CERTIFIABLE SPECIES

© Darius A Irani, 2023

A CERTIFIABLE SPECIES

 About 390 million years ago life crawled out of the oceans and began the long process of populating the land surface of our planet. During this long childhood, Nature would be interrupted five times by extinction level events. Nature did not care. It measures its progress in millions of years and millions of little changes. It just picked up the pieces and continued its inexorable journey to wherever it is going. The last extinction level event was about 65 million years ago. When it was done, the largest surviving land mammal was a tree dwelling, shrew like creature, about the size of a shoe box. The good news was that the hungry reptiles that had ruled over the plains were all gone. This allowed mammalian life to leave the safety of the trees and slowly move onto the plains. Evolution did its thing, and what we see around us is the result - an unimaginable diversity of plant and animal life.

We call our home a planet. It is a moniker that dates back two thousand years. The early Greeks could look up at the night sky and almost everything they saw reaffirmed their geocentric view of the universe. The Sun, Moon and all the stars appeared to revolve around the earth exactly as they were supposed to. However, there were seven objects whose behavior was totally unpredictable. Because they seemed to meander all over the sky, the Greeks decided to call them wanderers, which in Greek is the word planetes. What we now know is that both the geocentric and subsequent heliocentric views of the universe were totally incorrect. Our Planet is not at the center of anything. Our Sun is merely an average star in an obscure quadrant of an insignificant galaxy. The wanderer we call home is actually a spaceship. It may not look anything like the International Space Station or how Hollywood depicts spaceships, but none the less it is one. It is hurtling through interplanetary space at about 66,000 mph while managing to keep everything together and keep us alive.

Interplanetary space is about the deadliest environment a living creature can find itself in. Besides having no air, water or food, the temperature is minus 450 degrees F. At this temperature, all water-based life forms - like us - would become chunks of ice in just a few minutes. The ONLY reason we exist is because of the protection and nourishment provided by our spaceship home. Yet, in our boundless stupidity we are doing everything we can to destroy it.

 On our planet, all land-dwelling creatures need four things to survive, prerequisites if you will: Air (Oxygen) to breathe; Water for hydration; Food for nourishment; and a suitable environment to live in. There is a useful rule of thumb that underscores our total dependence on these four items. We humans can only survive for about three minutes without air, three hours in dangerous temperatures, three days without water, and, three weeks without food. A few hundred years from now, if there are still any historians around, they will be astounded by our apparent determination to self destruct. What - they will wonder - drove us to pollute our air, contaminate our water, overwhelm our food producing resources, and push our environment over a brink from which it might not return. What is unconscionable is that in our selfishness and greed, we will also eradicate all the other species we share our home with.

(Would be survivalists should take heed. All the prerequisite are unyielding. Look at the whole picture. Having enough food for many years won’t do you any good if you are going to die in one week because you don’t have any potable water!)

The Last Glacial Period ended about 11,000 years ago. At that time all the species were in balance. No species had a clear advantage. Life and death were equally uncertain in the struggle to survive. For whatever reason and in whatever way, one species - humans - began to surpass all the others, both intellectually and culturally. So much so that now, we can on a whim eradicate any other species that we want to. No other species can do this. We harbor the delusion that we are modeled in the image of some deity. This somehow makes us superior to and gives us dominance over all other life that we share this planet with. Consequently, we believe that perpetuating ourselves is the highest priority, and if other species fall by the wayside, so be it.

 Our greatest construction projects are miniscule in scope compared to the size of our planet. This should be a warning that if we break something we have neither the skills nor the material needed to fix it. If what we break provides one of the four prerequisites for life – life will end. Nature will not care. It has seen it all five times before. A few million years from now, new life will emerge. It may not look anything like what we now see around us, but Nature WILL survive – we won’t.

At the very core of our selfishness is our population. Some scientists estimate that our planet was designed to support about 3 billion humans. Let’s be generous and say 4 billion. Our actual population has just surpassed 8 billion. This is madness. The only other spaceship we can draw a parallel with is the International Space Station. It is designed to support a crew of seven. Would we dare to pack it with 14 humans – of course not. There would not be enough air, water or food. It would be suicidal. Why then are we doing on a scale of billions what we would not dare to do on the scale of a dozen? The answer probably lies somewhere between ignorance and complacency with a lot of greed mixed in. Our home has tolerated and absorbed our excesses for so long that we believe we can keep on abusing it with no consequences. This is a potentially fatal fallacy. We are on a spaceship. Spaceships are finite, bounded and surrounded by infinite danger. If we kick it often enough it will break. A few years from now, if what we thought were hundred year weather events start occurring annually, we will realize that it is too late. The slippery slope to extinction is not very steep, but it is merciless and implacable. We will have lots of time to do what we seem to do best - point fingers and blame each other while doing nothing!

NATURE WILL SURVIVE - PART 2. EATING THE WHOLE DAMN FRUIT SALAD

© Darius A Irani, 2023

EATING THE WHOLE DAMN FRUIT SALAD.

Most of us have no idea of the specific events that had to occur in just the right sequence over the last 4 billion years before complex life could emerge on our planet. Could the same sequence have happened somewhere else - possibly. When one is dealing with billions of galaxies each with billions of stars, to claim uniqueness would be hubris. However, the odds of us reaching such a planet are very small even if we could predict where it would be when we finish our journey. The distances are so vast and our technology so primitive, that it would take thousands of years just to exit the Oort Cloud at the very edge of our solar system. No electromechanical devices could function for even a minute fraction of the duration of the journey, the spaceship would only be able to transport a few dozen earthlings, and the generation that started the journey would be old before they even got to Neptune. There is no Plan B. This beautiful blue orb is all we have. If we destroy it, everything we have done and accomplished will be destroyed with it. Maybe, just maybe, if we understand the odds that Nature had to overcome to bring it all together, we might better appreciate the gift of life we have been given. We might even realize that our ideologies, religions, wealth, power and all the other stupid things we fight over are meaningless. The ONLY thing that matters is preserving our spaceship home.  

Useful Information  

A mile (or Kilometer) is too small a unit to measure inter-planetary distances within our Solar system. On the other hand, a Light-year is more suitable for measuring interstellar distances, but too large for inter-planetary gaps. Consequently, astronomers have identified an intermediary unit of length for measuring distances within the solar system – The Astronomical Unit (AU). The Earth’s orbit is almost circular with a radius averaging about 93 million miles (about 149 million km). The difference in the radii between perihelion and aphelion is only about 3.16 million miles. This average radius of 93 million miles is the dimension of an AU. The closest planet to the Sun is Mercury with an orbital radius of only 0.387 AU, and furthest is Neptune at about 30 AU. At the furthermost reaches of our solar system is the Oort cloud at a staggering 5,000 to 10,000 AU  

Almost all life on our planet is inextricably tied to water and oxygen. The appearance of these two substances represents significant turning points in the emergence and evolution of complex organisms on the planet’s surface. Consequently, as we explore our origins, these two substances are on the top of the list for prerequisites. Can life exist without Oxygen? Yes, it can. There are simple organisms that get their energy from Sulphur and not Oxygen. However, these are very primitive organisms. Very few of these are multicellular, and none comprise more than a dozen or so cells.  

Location is Everything  

All stars have a defined orbital area called the habitable zone (HZ). Within this zone it is not too hot or too cold and a planet can sustain water on its surface. For any given star, the distance of this zone from the star, and its extent depends on the size and luminosity of the star. An orbit closer than the HZ would result in high surface temperatures and water would be lost by heat and the greenhouse effect. Incoming infrared radiation would be trapped, and the water would boil away. At greater distances, the greenhouse effect would be inadequate to prevent the water from freezing. Within our solar system Earth is the only planet within this zone. Mercury and Venus are too close to the Sun, and Mars together with all the outer gas giants are outside this zone. We are barely in it!  

Sol’s habitable zone stretches from 0.9 AU to 1.5AU. Some estimates suggest that the inner boundary may be 0.95 AU or even 0.99 AU. Thus, we are right on the brink of being too hot to hold any water. This makes our headlong rush towards global warming an even greater act of insanity. If we were just 2.5 million miles closer to the sun, life would not exist. Be that as it may, the Earth came together as a planet at just the right distance from the sun and here we are.  

Size Matters  

Large stars have life spans measured in just millions of years. Complex life on Earth took about 3 billion years to emerge. Consequently, had our Sun been much larger, the Earth would not have had enough time for life to emerge and evolve into the diversity and complexity we see around us.   

Very small stars (red dwarfs) pose their own limitations. They are much cooler than the sun, so their habitable zone is much closer and narrower. The immediate consequence is that any planet in the HZ would be tidally locked to the star, preventing it from rotating. One half would always face the star and the other would be in perpetual darkness - just like our moon. Life on such a planet would be both different and unpleasant. For starters, these small stars emit mainly Infra-Red radiation, so on the star side vision would have evolved to work in this wavelength. Whereas the other side would have adapted for almost total darkness. Yet again we beat the odds and got a star that was the right distance away and would give us heat and energy for 10 billion years. Now all we needed was Oxygen.  

Cyanobacteria Save the Day  

The air we breathe is composed of 78.09% Nitrogen, 20.95% Oxygen, 0.93% Argon, 0.039% Carbon dioxide and traces of other gases. It was not always so. In the beginning - 4.6 billion years ago – our atmosphere was composed of Methane, Hydrogen Sulfide, and much Carbon Dioxide, but no Oxygen. Primitive microbes were present, living anaerobically on Sulfate.  The surface of our planet must have been a desolate landscape. Almost Lunar in appearance, bereft of plant or animal life. Six hundred million years later the oceans had formed, but there was still no Oxygen in the atmosphere. If it were not for the Cyanobacteria, this would have been the end of the story. Strictly speaking, there would have been no story at all because there would be no one to write it.  

Fossils of Cyanobacteria date back 3.5 billion years making them just about the oldest living things on our planet. They are still the largest and most important group of bacteria. They produce Oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis and are responsible for the original presence of Oxygen in our atmosphere. Oxygen, however, is a very clingy element. It easily bonds to other elements e.g., Iron to form rust. So, in the early stages, whatever Oxygen was produced in the atmosphere would quickly be absorbed by the so called “sink” elements like Iron.    

Finally, about 2.33 billion years ago a small amount of Oxygen made a permanent presence in the atmosphere. This was the start of a rapid but not understood increase in atmospheric Oxygen. Scientists call this period the GOE (Great Oxygenation Event). At the end of the GOE the atmosphere contained enough Oxygen to support multicellular life, which is a prerequisite for complex organisms to evolve. The stage was now set. Nature had beat the odds and won the trifecta. We had the right star, a good orbit, plenty of water and Oxygen. Things would crawl out of the oceans and stay. Evolution would do the rest, and our species would be given the gift of life.  

A Second Eden  

Fast forward a few hundred million years to the middle of the eighteenth century. The quality of life for humans was not very good (that is another story) but the planet was in great shape. Humans had long ago invented agriculture and we had enough room to feed the then world population of about 800 million. Knowledge of medicine and disease was still very primitive, so life expectancy was shortish. But the planet teemed with flora and fauna. So much so, that several scientists were beginning to theorize why this might be, eventually resulting in the theory of evolution. We were just about to start exterminating other living creatures, so the bison herds and plains Indians and a host of other species were blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited them. It almost looked like the garden of Eden resurrected once more. If our planet could feel rueful about itself, it would call those the ‘good old days.’  

Then two turning points changed everything. These were the start of the two industrial revolutions, and a series of explosive increases in our population. Although they did have some harmful socio-economic effects on humans, by and large the industrial revolutions would herald two centuries of intellectual advancement for our civilization. Sadly, this came at a huge cost to our environment. Both the industrial revolutions were fueled by combustion. The first by external combustion in the form of steam engines, and the second by the more familiar internal combustion engines. Every car we drive, every electrical switch we turn on, every tap that delivers water to our homes, every stocked shelf in a grocery store, every power tool we use, almost everything we take for granted is only possible because somewhere combustion provided energy, but it also produced CO2. Even every breath we take adds to the CO2 in our atmosphere.  

CO2 is not the most efficient greenhouse gas. Luckily, the others are only present in trace quantities.  CO2 itself comprises barely .04% of our atmosphere, but its effect is way out of proportion to its volume. The evidence suggests that historically, CO2 remained at a steady level for thousands of years. Then starting in the mid-eighteenth century – coinciding with the start of the industrial revolution - its level gradually increased until now it is 50% greater than that historical baseline.  

Nature is very clever. From the start it realized that the level of CO2 had to be contained, and Oxygen had to be regenerated. So, it created a huge sink for the gas. Whereas most fauna absorb oxygen for energy and dump CO2 as waste, flora do the exact opposite. Via Photosynthesis, plants (and other organisms in the oceans) absorb CO2, extract carbon for energy and dump oxygen as their waste. A perfectly balanced duality that even yin and yang would be proud of. A balance that survived for thousands of years until our greed and sheer numbers overwhelmed it. Between destroying our forests, polluting our oceans and using combustion to provide our ever-increasing energy needs, the planet can no longer replenish the amount of Oxygen we are consuming. This may not affect our generation, or the next hundred generations, but one day it will kill what is left of us. 

Eating the whole damn fruit salad  

Mankind's earliest records date back to about 10,000 BCE. So, it is probably safe to suggest that it took about 11,750 years for the human population to get to 800 million in 1750. By 1900, just 150 years later it had doubled to 1.6 billion. Then we had a century of war, despair and genocide which would cost over 300 million lives. You would think this would have slowed us down. Far from it, our population increased fivefold to over 8 billion. If we superimpose the graph of our population growth on top of the change in CO2 levels, the correlation is undeniable. Our numbers are killing us, but we do not seem to care.  

Rumor has it that when there were just two of us, we were very naughty and took a measly little bite from an apple. For this minor misdemeanor we were evicted from the first Eden. Now that there are 8 billion of us, we appear to be retaliating by eating the whole damn fruit salad, and screwing Eden while we are at it! 

Nature Will Survive - Part 6. THE FOURTH HORSEMAN

THE FOURTH HORSEMAN

The Search 

By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists had little doubt left that mass and energy were interchangeable, and at the start of the twentieth century Einstein cemented this relationship with his pithy equation E=MC2. One wonders how famous this equation would be if C was not such a large number. Certainly, the world would be a much safer place. Sadly, for our planet, C is very large and C square is enormous. It is not rocket science to realize that if we could convert even a little M into E, we would get a very big bang. Given our perpetual hunt for more effective ways to kill each other, the search was on for a chemical reaction that would lose a little M.  

Late in 1938 while bombarding Uranium with neutrons German physicists (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman) were surprised to find Barium amidst the Uranium. Those were innocent days, and there was a free exchange of information between scientists, and this finding came to the attention of Lise Meitner. Ms. Meitner was a German scientist who had fled Hitler’s Germany because there were traces of Jewishness in her ancestry. She and her cousin Otto Frisch – a fellow scientist – deduced what had happened. Uranium atoms had split into two smaller atoms, one of which was Barium, and the resulting mass was less than that of the original Uranium atom. She even calculated how much energy was released by this process. It was now inevitable. Germany, Great Britain and the USA started a race to exploit this reaction and make a bomb. 

The Race 

Uranium exists as three isotopes. The most common non-radioactive U238, and the rarer, radioactive and fissile U235 (there is an even rarer isotope U234.) In nature U238 is about 140 times more prevalent than U235, and it would take a lot of engineering research to perfect techniques for separating U235 to the levels required to sustain a fission reaction. Further, by bombarding U238 with Neutrons, a new artificial element was produced - Plutonium 239 - which was also radioactive and fissile. So, a second project was set in place to use reactors to produce weapons grade Plutonium.  

After just a short time, both the US and the UK combined their resources into a single effort – The Manhattan Project. It would take this team several years to complete the design and accumulate enough fissile material to make the first three bombs. By then Germany and Italy had been defeated and Japan was the only remaining enemy. Too late the Allies would realize that Germany was so far behind that its nuclear program had never been a threat. Had the Allies known this earlier, there was at least the hope - however improbable - that they might not have built the bomb, and our planet and species had a real chance for true world peace. But, we built the bloody thing, and now psychopaths all over the world have got dozens and some have hundreds of copies.

Back to WWII. The Japanese were refusing to surrender unconditionally, and the closer the allies got to the home islands, the more ferocious, fanatical and suicidal the Japanese defenders became. After the battle for Okinawa there was little doubt that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives, almost half of whom would be civilians.  As cruel and callous as this might sound, the two bombs ended the war with the least number of casualties on both sides. 

The first bomb “Little Boy” was very uncomplicated and inefficient. The design was simple enough that it was not felt necessary to test it. It basically shot two subcritical masses of U235 into each other at high velocity and showered them with Neutrons. It is estimated that less than 2% of the available fissile material actually contributed to the resulting explosion, but efficiency was not important. It just had to work with devastating effect, and it did. It produced an explosion equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT, destroying almost everything in a half mile radius from ground zero, and killing everyone within a 1-mile radius. A good estimate of the number immediately killed and wounded is 100,000. 

The other two bombs were more efficient and used Plutonium 239 as the fissile material. To verify that this design worked, one of the two was exploded at the Loas Almos proving grounds, and its brother, named “Fat Man” would be dropped on Nagasaki. Because of the geography of the region, it resulted in only half the casualties of Hiroshima. Nonetheless, together they achieved their objective. Despite objections from the armed forces, Emperor Hirohito agreed to an unconditional surrender. 

Making Like Gods 

It could have ended there. It should have ended there, but human nature being what it is, it did not. Some of us were now demigods with the biggest stick in the neighborhood, and it was impossible to not use it to win arguments with our neighbors. If the stick is so big that one only has to threaten to use it, the temptation is irresistible. The problem is that the neighbors are now so irate at losing the argument without even daring to put up a fight, that they become determined to get their own even larger sticks, and the madness continues.  

While the communist bloc was racing to develop their own bomb, the Western allies refined the size, efficiency and power of these weapons, resulting in yields ranging from 20 tons to 170 kilotons. Thousands (not exaggerating, thousands) were manufactured and deployed in everything from artillery shells (The Davy Crocket recoilless rifle) to torpedoes and cruise missiles.  

Meanwhile, spurred on by Russian development, the demigods were aspiring to full godhood status. A second race started to utilize the very power of the stars. Could the pressure and temperature created by a fission bomb be used to fuse atoms of Hydrogen into Helium with an even bigger bang? Why not? The Gods do it in the stars, why can't we? And we did. We created the fusion or Hydrogen Bomb. Now, destructive power 100 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb was available, and our “civilization” and our spaceship home were just a small misstep away from extinction.  

Compared to the destructive power of the Hydrogen bombs (strategic weapons,) the old fission bombs were so underpowered that they were now relegated to the secondary role of “low yield” and “tactical weapons” more suitable to be used on battlefields, and not adequate to decide the outcome of a full-scale war. The first letter in all the acronyms for the various arms limitation treaties is always “S” for Strategic. Tactical nukes are not even counted as part of any arms limitation treaties.  

It is a harsh indictment against our civilization that a weapon that merely 80 years ago was sufficient to end the greatest conflict we have ever known, is now considered to be inconsequential. 

The scope of our MADness 

The Russians were - and still are - obsessed with size as a means of intimidation. They wanted there to be no doubt that whether via a first or second strike, in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange, Western societies would be decimated. In the 60s they manufactured ICBMs aptly named SATAN by NATO (SARMAT by the Russians.) These carried a single warhead with a yield of 18+ megatons. Thankfully, we have no empirical knowledge of the impact of such a monstrous weapon. But we can extrapolate what might happen based on the much smaller 10 KTon explosion at Hiroshima.  

 Hiroshima demonstrated that a 10 KTon yield weapon will kill 100K humans when used against a typical city. Extrapolating this linearly, an 18 MTon monster has the potential to instantly vaporize 180 million humans. In 1965, the total population of the US was about 194 million. If we had been obliging enough to all congregate to one central spot, a single one of these could have wiped us all out. The only formula for Western survival was to match the Russians, weapon for weapon, and the MADness continued. 

Two factors made such a weapon obsolete. Firstly, rapid advancements in computational power made the interception of simple ballistic trajectories easy. More importantly, its sheer destructive power was impractical. There is no target that justifies such destructive power. Even 60 years later the largest cities in the world only have populations of about 20 million and most of them are in China! So, Russia (and the USA) developed the MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) ICBMs. These start out as ballistic missiles, but mid-flight they start spitting multiple independent warheads and decoys, each heading for a different target. These are very hard to intercept. 

My Stick is bigger than your Stick 

Russia’s obsession with massive destructive power peaked in 1961 when they created a bomb with a potential yield of 100 MTons (the Tsar Bomba.) In a surprising show of restraint, they decided that such a large explosion might be too dangerous and lowered the yield to 50 MTons before detonating it. In theory such a bomb would have a kill zone larger than most of the continents.

Holding Hands on the Road to Hell 

By 1962 both the superpowers had accumulated enough destructive power to decimate the whole Planet no matter who struck first, and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was fashioned. Basically, if either side was attacked for any reason, the other could retaliate or escalate until both sides were annihilated, taking the whole Planet to hell with them. As we will see later, a total nuclear exchange will leave no survivors. 

This doctrine achieved the pinnacle of obtuseness in 1972 with the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Its basic premise was that to avoid another weapons race, both parties agreed to not defend themselves against the other parties' existing weapons!! Each party was allowed to build a defense system to protect just one city and one retaliatory launch facility. Everything else was to be left undefended. Surviving by allowing annihilation, who knew lunatics could be so clever. 

President George W Busch withdrew the US from this treaty in 2002, and the asylum doors were now wide open. The loonies were set free to find new and better ways to kill us all, and they have. 

SUPERORUZHIE (Super weapons) 

In March 2018 Putin announced the creation of a family of five new super weapons. The first was the RS-28 Sarmat. Intended to replace the earlier SATAN ICBM. It is a liquid fueled super heavy ICBM. Each one can carry 10 independent warheads each with a yield of at least 750KTons. A few decoys would be thrown in to make interception harder. It is estimated that 20 of these would be enough to completely obliterate the entire US. They were scheduled to enter service in 2022. A notable feature of its warheads is the use of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS.) In theory, these would use a low Earth orbit (about 90 miles high) and approach from over the South Pole thus avoiding the extensive detection methods pointing at the North Pole. 

Unlike the ballistic and predictable trajectory outside the Earth’s atmosphere of a conventional ICBM, the Avangard Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) spends most of its time travelling at very high speeds (about Mach 20 at launch) in the upper atmosphere. Its ability to maneuver at these high speeds may help it to evade interception. 

Then there is the Poseidon, a nuclear-armed, unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). Basically, a large, nuclear powered, autonomous, and fast (maybe 70 knots – faster than anything could catch it) nuclear tipped torpedo. Supposedly, it can dive to depths where manned submarines can't follow it. Some analysts suggest that depending on its yield, it could create a Tsunami about 1000 feet high and when salted with Cobalt 59 could render vast swaths of coastline uninhabitable for decades. 

How many times do they want to kill each of us? 

For obvious reasons the exact size of the various arsenals is a closely guarded secret, but analysts on both sides have reasonable estimates of the number of deployed and standby warheads available to Russia and the US. Remember we are only counting the Strategic (Fusion bombs) weapons. A good estimate of the total number of deployed and ready to use strategic warheads is 3,000. There are about 6,000 more that are stockpiled, but we can ignore them. Keeping it simple, let’s assume each of these has a destructive yield equivalent to just half a megaton of TNT. This means that when the shit hits the fan, the equivalent of about 1.5 billion tons of TNT is going to go BANG. The human population is currently at 8 billion, which suggests that on average there are 375 pounds of TNT out there with each of our names on it. Given how much damage a hand grenade can do, it would seem that 5 pounds of TNT would be more than enough to blow any one of us to smithereens. 375 pounds would blow each of us up 75 times. Do the loonies think any of us will care after the first time! 

When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the Earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the Earth.

— Revelation 6:7–8 (New American Standard Bible)

BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING MORE FREQUENTLY

Copyright Darius A. Irani,2023

Most pathogens are designed to be killing machines and have been around for thousands of years. So, it is interesting to study if their frequency and behavior changed as our population changed. However, understanding their impact on human society had to wait until men started keeping a record of these events and how they had shaped their lives. The earliest such record is during the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE. In the intervening 2,700 years there have been close to 100 recorded events of epidemics and pandemics.

In the early years knowledge of medicine was almost nonexistent. Trying to diagnose what a pathogen might have been based on the descriptions provided by laymen almost three millennia ago is challenging. Thankfully, there are many modern scientists who have devoted much effort to analyzing the documented symptoms and providing a best guess as to the nature of these killers. Equally important is a parallel body of research that provides us with estimates of changes in the world’s population during this period. So, finding such a correlation, if there is one, is possible.

However, as one digs into the available data, one realizes that we are dealing with something much more complicated. Not only is there a correlation between the frequency of the pathogens and the growth of the human population, but we also see four other traits: some pathogens exhibit a singularity of purpose; some an ability to go dormant, when necessary; some have a subsequent influence on the course of history far out of proportion to the impact of the pandemics themselves; and, some display an ability to adapt to our defenses and to evolve into lethal variations. When looked at holistically we are tempted to question the very nature of Nature. Is Nature just a benign aggregate of all living things around us? In which case these events are random and accidental. Or, is Nature far more complex? Potentially even sentient. If so, with what ultimate purpose?

(At the end of this essay is an Xcel spreadsheet. It contains a list of all the known pandemics/epidemics, their date and possible nature of the pathogen.)

CORRELATION or COINCIDENCE

Our population increase has not been a gradual linear process. Instead, it has been periods of exponential growth. Our span of 2,700 (701 BCE to modern times) years can logically be broken into three eras for deeper analysis.

E1: 701 BCE to 1499 CE (2,200 years) The world’s population grew from 75 million to 450 million. A very modest average of less than 200,000 per year. There are only 11 recorded events. Three were smallpox, five were the plague (Yersinia pestis), and three are not fully understood. This averages out to one event every 200 years. During this span, our knowledge of medicine was limited. We did not know what was causing these illnesses or how to stop them, so they were able to run rampant until they petered out on their own. The most devastating pandemic ever recorded occurred in this era. The Black Death of 1347 – 1351. It is estimated that as many as 150 million died during this single event.

E2: 1500 CE to 1899 CE (400 years) We transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. There was an explosion in both the world’s population and in international exploration. The population tripled to 1.6 billion. This is an average increase of four million every year. The number of pandemics also tripled to 37. We are now looking at a major event about every eleven years, or twenty times more frequently than in E1. The bacterias dominate for the last time with 26 events. The nature of the bacterium changed abruptly in 1816 when the old reliable plague had run its course and was replaced with cholera (more on this later). Smallpox starts to emerge as an efficient killer worldwide. Many sources suggest that in 18th century Europe it killed about 400,000 every year, and 500 million in the century preceding its extinction in 1980. Its spread worldwide can be directly linked to human exploration and colonization. Indigenous peoples in America and Australia had no resistance to it and were decimated, allowing for easy conquest.

E3: 1900 CE to 2020 CE (120 years) The human population now increases 5-fold to 7.8 billion. This is an astounding rate of 65 million per year, or 185,000 more births than deaths every day. The attacks keep pace with 44 events, about once every two and a half years, or four times as frequently as in E2. The numbers do not lie, bad things are happening more frequently, and in direct correlation with our population increase.

This was an egregious and selfish increase. No other species could sustain such an expansion. There is simply not enough space or naturally occurring food on the planet. Humans, however, have been endowed with some unique skills. We are the only species that can grow our own food and mold our environment to suit our needs. We can expand into areas we were not adapted for by building shelters and controlling their environments to keep us comfortable. This, together with advances in medicine and agriculture, has enabled us to not only sustain this population growth, but to continue to increase it.

This population explosion is even more astounding when one considers the travesty that was the 20th century. It was a time full of anguish and despair. A total of 51 wars and 50 genocides would take 250 million lives. Pathogens would kill at least another 86 million. Many millions would be forced out of their ancestral homes and become permanent refugees in squalid camps. Yet, our need to procreate is apparently so primal that despite the uncertainty and even depravation of the basics of everyday life - or maybe because of it – we accelerated headlong down the path of geocide and self-destruction.

Such an expansion is not without a price. As the need for arable land increased, we started burning down our forests and woodlands. The other species that called these spaces their home were pushed out and started dying off. And, when the land was not enough to sustain us, we started denuding the oceans and polluting them. This is madness. We live in a spaceship. Everything we need to survive must come from within the ship. Just because we can grow our own food does not mean we can also provide the other prerequisites for life. For example, we cannot produce more Oxygen. There is ONLY ONE way in which our planet’s Oxygen is replenished. That is through photosynthesis in trees and through organisms in our oceans. Between deforestation, our population explosion and our dependency on combustion for providing energy, we are already seeing a steady decline in the level of atmospheric Oxygen. The end will not come for many generations, but when it does it will not be pleasant.

WHY ONLY US – A JUSTIFIED PARANOIA

As organisms go, viruses are very primitive. They do not even meet the accepted criteria to be called living. On their own they are ineffective and die after a brief lifespan. However, lodge them in a host and there is no stopping them. They will take over the resources of the host and multiply until they kill the host itself. Smallpox, Polio, and Measels are three of the most prominent of the historic viral killers. They also have something in common. They are all non-zoonotic. They have NO OTHER hosts in nature. Even our nearest relatives - chimps - cannot host them.

Cholera is a bacterium. It does not need a host to survive. It is alive in its own right. Starting in the latter half of the 19th century, it replaced the plague as the dominant bacterial killer. It too very rarely affects any species other than humans. There is no known insect vector for it, and no animal reservoir has been found.

There you have it. Four of the most prolific killers of all time have only ONE purpose. To maim and kill humans!

At some level this either makes no sense or poses a profound question. There was no evolutionary advantage for these viruses to restrict themselves to just one host – especially a host that lives in well-defined spaces. In fact, it is a death sentence. We discovered vaccines for all three viral killers, isolated humans who were infected, surrounded them with a ring of vaccinated humans and strangled the viruses into extinction. This would have been impossible if they had been zoonotic.

Smallpox has been around for thousands of years. It has killed millions of our species by making billions of copies of itself in its hosts. All this multiplication, and not a single mutation!! Compare it to Covid-19. In just three years we have seen over a dozen mutations, and they keep on coming. Modern estimates are that humans and chimps (and bonobos) have 98.7% of their DNA in common. All it would have needed was a small, fortuitous change, a minor alteration and smallpox could have jumped to a primate and still be around. But no. Whatever created it gave it strict instructions. You can ONLY kill humans. You cannot infect or harm ANY OTHER living creature. What then created such a killer, and why? If we can ever answer this question, we may have taken the first step in understanding what we are and why we are here.

AN INCOGNITO JOURNEY

Smallpox is an old-world disease. The early Spanish explorers brought it to the new world. In 1520, barely 20 years after Columbus landed on Hispaniola the first recorded pandemic would kill about 8 million in Mexico. Its journey across the Atlantic poses a conundrum. In those days, Spanish ships would leave the mainland and stop at the Canary Islands to replenish before starting the crossing. From there it would take about 35 days before landfall in the West Indies. Because it is non-zoonotic, the carrier had to be a crew member. It usually took 10 days after infection for the first symptoms to emerge. Even if he had been infected on the last day before leaving the islands, barely a third of the journey would have been completed before he showed symptoms and became infectious himself. In the cramped quarters of the ships of that time, the disease would have ravaged the crew. Yet, they appear to have arrived safely and mingled with the local population before the disease started its killing. This raises alarming possibilities. Can Smallpox can go dormant? Current thinking is that there are five viruses that can go dormant, but Smallpox is not one of them. If it did not go dormant then how did it cross the Atlantic? Might it actually be Zoonotic and we just don't know what the host is? Neither of these possibilities bode well for our species.

This could also be a warning to us that we are just one big, connected tribe – even more so now. There is nowhere we can go that is beyond nature’s reach. It did not need an intercontinental jet that could cross the Atlantic in eight hours. Just a small wooden boat propelled only by wind and sail was more than enough.

DECIDING BATTLES AND CHANGING HISTORY

Our perpetual belligerence and resulting wars - which are also well documented – have often played into the hands of these killers. Battlefields are a fertile breeding ground for pathogens. The weary survivors are easy prey for these microscopic predators, becoming unsuspecting carriers for spreading the diseases on their trek back to their homelands. In many cases, these pathogens have altered the course of a struggle with unforeseen consequences for years to come.

The earliest known record is during the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE by King Sennacherib of Assyria. It is referenced three times in the Bible (II Kings 18 & 19; Chronicles 32; and the Book of Isaiah 36 & 37.) “For I will defend this city to save it for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake. Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians ….” (Isaiah) The implication is that God saved his people by infecting the Assyrians with some fatal disease. A more likely explanation is that the water wells outside the city walls had been deliberately poisoned. Whatever the cause, the Assyrians had bigger fish to fry and decided to move on from this place of death and pestilence. Thus, sparing Jerusalem and its fledging new religion, Judaism.

Sennacherib had no idea that this decision to spare Jerusalem would be one of the most important turning points in history. Had the Assyrians prevailed, “...Judaism would have disappeared from the face of the earth and the two daughter religions of Christianity and Islam could not possibly have come into existence. In short, our world would be profoundly different in ways we cannot really imagine.” (Infectious Alternatives by William H. McNeill)

The very next recorded epidemic is the Athenian plague of 430 BCE. It struck in the second year of the Peloponnesian war, when Athens was under siege and seriously overpopulated with refugees. The pathogen would decimate about a quarter of the city's population - about 75,000 - and was a significant contributor to its eventual defeat.

Early in 165 CE the Romans launched a military operation against Parthia. The returning troops brought Smallpox back with them. What followed was the first recorded pandemic. The effect on Rome was so devastating that it is thought to have created the conditions for the decline and ultimate fall of the Roman Empire. The ultimate killer was the plague/Black Death (Yersinia pestis). It coincided with the start of the 100-year war between England and France. Between them they had allies from 12 other European regions. Given the extensive breeding grounds, multiple carriers, and long journeys home, it would be the greatest killing event in all recorded history. Estimates of the number of dead vary from 75 million to 200 million.

ADAPTING TO OUR DEFENSES

Until the early 19th century, the dominant bacterium continued to be Y. pestis. Although the root cause of the plague would not be discovered until 1894, Europeans had realized as early as the “Great Northern Plague” of 1700 that separation of the sick from the healthy was the only way to contain this killer. Infected locations would be sealed off by ‘cordons sanitaires’ and the infected would be quarantined in plague houses. By the time of “Caragea’s plague” in 1813, Y. pestis’ ability to spread and kill was being severely curtailed.

Nature responded by coming up with a new killer. Gone now were the clearly recognizable buboes. Rats and fleas were no longer relevant. Nature started using water - the most essential of our nutrients to kill us. During the 19th century, cholera would break out in the form of six pandemics. It was so contagious that outbreaks that started in India would within a year spread throughout Europe and Asia. The timing of these outbreaks is enigmatic. Cholera is borne out of poor sanitation resulting in unsafe water and food. It would seem more likely that the Middle Ages, with their significantly poorer living conditions, would have provided a better breeding ground for such a pathogen. Yet it is conspicuously absent until the 19th century. It is almost as if Nature was hiding Cholera up its sleeve, waiting for Y. Pestis to run its course before unleashing it!

There are only two strains of cholera. The “classical” variant, and the modern version called El Tor. Both have existed in the waters of the Bay of Bengal for thousands of years. Yet, as we have seen, the classical version only became active late in the 19th century. Once it started, it remained unchanged, and spent the next 150 years emerging from the Ganges Delta at will to kill humans. Eventually, the advent of antibiotics would limit its mortality, though it still emerges in poor or war-torn countries where for obvious reasons sanitation has broken down. Late into the 19th century scientists began to recognize the efficacy of antibacterial chemicals and in 1928, with the discovery of penicillin the bacterial killers start to fade away. Eventually even smallpox was eradicated. Our planet was now facing a double threat: the human population was growing out of control and the ancestral killers that had served nature for centuries were now ineffective. So nature has now turned to a new class of pathogens – the Zoonotic viruses.

THE ZOONOTIC AGE

Because they are zoonotic, they cannot be eradicated. We cannot kill every host living in the wild. It is neither possible nor practical. Being viruses, we have no broad-spectrum antidotes like antibiotics. Each one needs a specific vaccine to control it. Within their hosts, they are free to mutate. Even a small mutation could render an existing vaccine useless. Our only remedy is to stay on top of the mutations and limit their damage. Then there are the anti-vaxers...

Humans started the 20th century with a catastrophe called WWI. Not to be outdone, Nature had its own calamity in store for us - the flu pandemic of 1918. It is thought to have started at Camp Funston in Kansas – the location of the first registered case – and then spread to Europe as thousands of US soldiers were deployed to the war zone. Initially it looked just like a virulent strain of the seasonal flu. By the spring of 1918 over half of the British and French troops living in the squalid cramped trenches of the Western front were infected, but not killed. By August 1918 it looked as though it had run its course. Sadly, this was not so. Somewhere in Europe it evolved into something so lethal that it could kill perfectly fit young humans within 24 hours of being infected. Before it finally petered out it had infected about a quarter of the world's population and killed as many as 50 million.

We will see this trio of dangers repeated in all the zoonotics: they are impossible to eradicate; once infected they can rarely be treated with any medication; and, to stay alive, they will evolve faster than we can keep up. Influenza type A variant H1N1 which was responsible for the outbreak in 1918 continued to evolve and circulate for the next 100 years. H2N2 emerged as the Asian flu in 1957-58, H3N2 as the Hong Kong flu in 1968-70 etc. Then, suddenly in 2009 it evolved into something quite different. Existing flu vaccines were ineffective in treating this new variant, and the result was a pandemic that may have killed as many as 500,000 worldwide.

In 1976 a new virus emerged from Africa – Ebola. It had remained hidden in the back waters of the Ebola River for 10,000 years. Its natural reservoir is suspected to be fruit bats which do not appear to be affected by it. Like smallpox and cholera, it almost exclusively targets primates, so it was primed to jump to humans. As our population mushroomed, our need for arable land and protein also increased. We went on a binge of deforestation and consumption of wild meat. This took us deeper into places we were probably not meant to go to. Someone ate an infected monkey, and Ebola jumped to humans.

It is a hemorrhaging disease. The Zaire variety has a mortality rate of over 80%, and death is a very bloody affair. The only reason it is contained is that transmission is not easy. It can only be spread by close and direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids. If it was any more contagious it would be the perfect killing machine.

AIDS emerged in 1981 and is still lurking. Its transmission is about as difficult as that of Ebola. Yet, Ebola has remained confined mostly to the African continent and the total number of deaths attributed to it are about 15 thousand, whereas AIDS has spread worldwide and is responsible for over 32 million deaths. Hmm.

This brings us face to face with THE zoonotic of our time – COVID 19. Like the other killers, the family of Corona viruses has been around for thousands of years. They all start out feeling like the common cold, but at least three variants are fatal to humans. The first is SARS CoV-1. It emerged from China in 2002. Its weakness was that it was not contagious during the incubation period, only after symptoms emerged. Thus, it was easy to identify and isolate the infected and prevent its spread. It only killed about 800 and was thousands of miles away, so we ignored it. Next came MERS-CoV in 2012. It jumped to humans from camels. It had a worrisome mortality rate of 35%. Because of the limited interaction between humans and camels, it could not get a large base of victims and petered out.

COVID-19 is the name of the disease that is caused by the SARS CoV-2 virus. It evolved from a pathogen that infected just a few thousand in 2002 (SARS CoV-1) to a pandemic that by 2022 had infected over 51 million worldwide and killed over one million. It is still around, evolving at a steady pace. It is zoonotic, so eliminating it is impossible, and every single host, both human and nonhuman, is a factory where random mutations are constantly occurring. We cannot control them or their effect on us.

There is no fairy tale happy conclusion here. The evolutionary trend does not end in some kind of peaceful coexistence between host and killer. The viruses want to live just as much as we do. They will constantly strive towards greater virulence. This ensures the largest number of hosts, which in turn provides the greatest number of factories churning out copies and mutations. We cannot afford an isolationist attitude. In the current age of jet travel, we are just one big, connected tribe. A virus that killed 800 Asians half a world away evolved into something that killed over 230,000 of our friends and families, on our doorsteps, just a few years later. If we had not ignored it in 2002 then we could have been ahead of the game with a vaccine when it got to our doorstep. The enemy is relentless and has an evolving arsenal that we can barely begin to comprehend. Denial and complacency will play right into its hands.

THE CONUNDRUM THAT WONT GO AWAY

Fast forward to September 2024. After 25 years, Polio has emerged in the war torn Gaza Strip. What has it been doing for all this time? It is a virus, so it must have a host to survive. It is non Zoonotic so the host can only be one of us. This leaves us with three alternatives:

1. Somewhere in Gaza - about the most densly populated place on Earth - an unfortunate family has for two and a half decades sheltered members who were infected with Polio. Within this family the virus has stayed alive with no one finding out about it, and no medical help being given to the victims. Hmmm!

2. The virus has somehow gone dormant waiting for just the right opportunity to wake up. What does it even mean for a virus to go dormant? It would require acquiring a human host and then suppressing its primal genetic disposition to multipy and kill. Polio, like Smallpox, is not one of the five viruses that we know can go dormant. However, if it could go dormant, the current war torn environment would be the perfect time to wake up.

3. Finally, we have to consider that our assumption that it is non Zoonotic is incorrect. Somewhere in Gaza it found an alternate host and stayed alive waiting for what it knew would eventually happen. As we have done throughout our history, we started killing each other again.

Either alternative 2 or 3 would also explain how smallpox crossed the Atlantic ten centuries ago.

November 11, 1918. 11:11:11 am

… If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

© Darius A Irani, 2023

A CALLOUS ENDING TO A POINTLESS WAR THAT FAILED TO END ALL WARS. 

WWI was touted to be the war that would end all wars. For such a noble endeavor the youth of Europe enlisted in their thousands and died in hundreds of thousands. If they had known then what we know now, from Ypres to Belfort they would have cursed the instigators of this mindless slaughter with their dying breaths. Barely twenty years later we would start the killing all over again – this time on a scale that would dwarf their 18 million dead.  

Early in October 1918, Ludendorff knew that Germany had lost, yet he prolonged the slaughter for five more weeks, hoping to gain some advantage in the armistice negotiations. The fact that another half million would die did not seem to bother him at all. The final act of cruel indifference would last for six hours. Germany signed the armistice at 5:12 am on November 11th. For all intents and purposes, the war should have ended right then. However, the armistice would officially not begin till the eleventh second of the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and no one saw fit to tell this to the troops who kept on shelling and killing each other for another six hours, during which another 2,738 men would die. So much for the war to end all wars! 

In America, this day is recognized as Veterans' Day, whilst in Europe it is Remembrance Day. For over a century we have commemorated this anniversary with laying of wreaths, solemn ceremonies and moments of silence – all of which have accomplished nothing concrete towards the final peace that WWI was supposed to accomplish. Here we are a hundred years later, and all it takes is a vicious dictator with nuclear weapons and a Veto, and both NATO and the UN are helpless to stop him. Meanwhile, the poor dead in Flanders fields are still waiting for some peaceful sleep. 

DOES LIFE SMELL?

Penny Lane having a bad hair day

© Darius A Irani, 2023

AND OTHER STRANGE QUESTIONS!

In the wild, many species spend their entire lives in tight knit groups and stay within well-defined territories. Within this space their group teaches them what food to eat, and how to find it. They also learn where to find water and shelter. Even animals that migrate over long distances usually follow the same path and the young learn by copying the elders who have done the journey before. None of this education is available to a domesticated dog. It barely gets to open its eyes before it is snatched away from its mother’s nurturing bosom and shipped off to a human family who could be hundreds of miles away for all it knows. Nothing prepares it for the sights, sounds and smells it will encounter in its new home. Yet, the dog adapts. Most importantly, it knows what it should and should not eat in a world full of alien smells. How does it know this? We believe that a dog’s primary interface with its environment is its sense of smell, and have devoted much research to the mechanics of smell. We can estimate that a dog’s sense of smell is thousands of times better than ours, but do we know what it is that they smell? And, can their noses detect something other than just chemical compounds?

Penny Lane is a Shihtweiler, a little girl with a big identity crisis. She is convinced that she is a 90 pound Rottweiler cleverly disguised to look like a nine pound Shih Tsu. Her attitude to the world around her is consistent with this grand delusion: if it moves attack it; if it is alive kill it; if it smells good eat it; if bored because nothing is moving, take a nap. Things are bound to be more interesting when she wakes up.

Last fall a leaf happened to be drifting across the back yard. To most dogs, motion is synonymous with life and prey, so Penny took off full tilt and pounced on it. What happened next was interesting. She took one sniff, realized it was not alive and immediately lost interest in it. On a typical walk she encounters millions of such leaves - same size, same shape and same color - and pays no attention to them. So it was clearly the motion of this leaf that launched the attack. How was it that with a single sniff she was able to decide that the leaf was not alive? Here is where it gets interesting. One cannot make a decision based on a single piece of data. To make a decision one needs at least two bits of information. So what was the second bit of information in her brain? Something that told her that ‘life’ had some property X and the leaf did not have this property so leave it and move on!

One possibility is that her chestnut sized brain contains a complete data base of the smell of every living creature she might ever encounter, so she can compare and discard as necessary. However, to have inherited such a list in her genes would require that her ancestors had, at some point, collectively encountered the smells of every living creature and stored them away for future generations to use - extremely unlikely. Another possibility is that all living creatures have a generic smell that identifies them as animate and vital, begging the question “Does Life Smell?”

On the other hand, it might not even be a smell that she was sensing? Basic Physics provides a very plausible proof that all moving creatures are surrounded by an electro magnetic field. Their “Aura,” or Chi/Ki in the Chinese and Japanese traditions respectively. Good Reiki practitioners can routinely connect and channel an individual’s Ki. What if dogs can also sense this Ki and use it to determine if something is alive or not? We could go even further and speculate that a universal force like Nature can also tap into this Ki to know where we are and whether we are alive or dead!

Sadly, although such a theory explains some of the phenomena, it still leaves many questions answered. For example, what happens to a chicken’s Ki after it has been killed and then boiled in water. To Penny, this is a scrumptious treat - why? What is she sensing that makes it palatable? What about processed foods like cookies which were never alive? What tells her that it is ok to eat them? Some experts argue that most dogs just grab at everything and worry about sorting it out later. Even if this were so, it merely pushes the decision from a very sensitive nose to a much less sensitive mouth. Moreover, in all the time I have known her, Penny has NEVER allowed anything to enter her mouth before first smelling it and satisfying herself that it is edible. Clearly, there is a lot left for us to understand about canine behavior and how they interact with the world around them.

The Apparent Futility of Prayer

© Darius A Irani, 2023

War and Genocide in the twentieth century inflicted a mind boggling degree of suffering on our species. For the first time, civilian deaths in warfare would outpace that of combatants. For example, in WWII there were 23 Million military deaths vs 53 Million civilian. A staggering ratio of more than two civilians dead for each soldier killed.  The total number of war related deaths during the whole century is about 140 Million. Applying the above ratio suggests that 100 Million non-combatants died as a direct consequence of war during the Twentieth century. A further 122 Million were killed by genocide. Taken together, 222 Million men women and children were never given a chance to live their lives to a natural conclusion. Let us assume that 22 Million of these were non believers in any kind of higher power (God, if you will), and another 50 Million were too young to know better. Drop another 50 Million as being just casual believers. This still leaves us with about 100 Million devout believers in some higher power, whose lives were prematurely snuffed out in very brutal ways. These were not just the Judaeo-Christian victims of Hitler’s cruelty. In reality, Mao and Stalin’s madness/brutality make Hitler look like a boy scout. Consequently, the ‘higher power’ that these 100 Million victims worshipped was quite varied. For our purposes it suffices that a god was worshipped and believed in.

These 100 Million were serious believers. They faithfully attended all the prescribed services. They sat, stood, knelt and genuflected as was required of them. They intoned all the prayers, sang all the songs, rang bells, burned incense, prayed to idols and adhered to all the rites and rituals. Heck, some of them even practiced symbolic cannibalism. They started doing this when they were hardly old enough to understand what they were doing and continued until they could barely remember why they were doing it. What they expected in return was that if the brown stuff ever hit the fan, this almighty GOD they worshipped would step up to the line and save them. Well, during that century, the brown stuff hit the fan in unimaginably copious quantities, and not a single one of them was saved. Not one. To the rational mind only two possibilities present themselves. Either, there is no God and any effort exerted in praying to one is an exercise in futility. Or, there is a God, but he is so callous and indifferent to our condition, that it is sheer arrogance to believe that he will pay any attention to our piddly supplications when he ignored the dying cries of a 100 Million devotees.

The three major religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - suggest a third possibility. There is a God, and, as unlikely as it may seem, he is loving and caring. But, he marches to the drum beat of his own plan. Sadly, we mere mortals are not wise enough to understand his master plan and so have not been sent the relevant memo. We must take it on faith that the plan is perfect and is being executed correctly. Embodied in this plan is the explanation for all the pain and suffering around us. The madness, the inhumanity, the brutality and selfishness all perfectly explained but hidden from us. So, where does prayer fit into this paradigm - arguably nowhere - because, if what one is praying for is part of THE plan, then the prayer is redundant. It will come to pass anyway. Conversely, if it is not part of THE plan then at least a hundred million anguished souls would admonish you to stop wasting your precious time praying for it to happen.

Prayer in the context of a natural disaster is even more controversial - the recent hurricane Ian is a good example. For starters, no known storm has ever spontaneously dissipated itself in a puff of smoke. They always make a painful and destructive landfall somewhere. So, praying that a storm misses you is the same as praying that it hits one of your neighbors instead. Probably not quite the purpose prayer was invented for! Secondly, what exactly controls the path of a hurricane? Is it the myriad of meteorological variables that constitute our weather, or is it some powerful hand of a divine entity that steers it this way or that? If it is the latter, then it would explain why meteorologists are so inept at getting their predictions right. Those silly people are using mathematical equations to try and predict divine behavior. Good luck with that. Finally, what are the poor suffering people in Ft. Myers Beach to make of all this? Why were their prayers less acceptable than say those of the faithful in Tampa (the original destination of the hurricane)? Why did some hand reach out and turn the storm South Eastwards thus sparing Tampa and demolishing them? Did the many Gods have an arm wrestling contest, and the guy from Tampa won? Or, should they be questioning their devotion to this savior who again didn’t bother to turn up when he was desperately needed?

Politicians on the other hand have mastered the exploitation of our belief in prayer. The expression “Thoughts and prayers” seems to date back to the revolutionary war. For obvious reasons it resurfaced during the civil war. It then went dormant until about 1999 when Clinton is supposed to have revived it - probably in the context of the Columbine shooting. It has since become the default act of inaction when dealing with mass shootings. Our conservative legislators aver that to take actual action for gun control would violate the second amendment. What they really don’t want to violate is the wazoo of the goose that is laying them golden eggs. Without the support of the gun lobby their re-election coffers would be significantly leaner. Consequently, as long as their constituents believe that praying and thinking are meaningful and sufficient actions, they will happily oblige them, and do little else. As long as half of America believes that the ability to take a life is more important than living without fear, the politicians will continue to appeal to divinities to solve a problem of our own making, and well within our own ability to solve.

All very enigmatic and even borderline irrational!