In one of Napoleon’s letters back to the Directory from Milan, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), he said he had captured an Austrian spy who had carried a letter for Emperor Francis in a cylinder in his stomach:
‘If they have diarrhoea,’ Napoleon added helpfully, ‘they make sure to take the little cylinder, soak it in liqueur and swallow it again. The cylinder is dipped in Spanish wax mixed with vinegar.’
Conventional explosives, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), are composed of large molecules that break down and release energy:
Those bonds are unstable, and when they are broken, the explosive detonates with a velocity of more than eight thousand meters a second.
By contrast, thermobarics do not explode at all; technically, they just burn very fast. Some types have their own oxidizer, but some simply react with oxygen in the air. In its simplest form, enhanced blast can be achieved simply by adding finely powdered metal such as aluminum to an explosive charge. More sophisticated versions consist of nothing but powdered metal and oxidizer; the explosive is released into a cloud, which is then set off with devastating effects.
Thermobarics are typically several times as powerful as TNT by weight because the oxidation reaction is more energetic than the breakdown of an explosive molecule. However, what is more surprising is that thermobarics are so far more destructive than condensed explosives with the same power. This is because the blast from an expanding thermobaric fireball goes on for longer than a normal blast. It still only lasts a matter of milliseconds, but the increased duration makes it more effective at bringing down walls.
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Known as the SMAW-NE (for Novel Explosive) , the new warhead contains four pounds of a mixture known as PBXIH-135, which combines a standard plastic explosive (PBX – Plastic Bonded eXplosive) with a precisely calibrated amount of finely powdered aluminum.
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One limitation was that the new SMAW round was far more effective inside a building than in the open air. Marines started using a two-stage approach: firing one of the old high-explosive SMAW rounds to make a hole in a wall, then firing a thermobaric round through the hole into the interior.
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You might survive a blast of forty pounds per square inch from a condensed explosive, but just ten pounds per square inch for a few milliseconds longer from a thermobaric blast will pulverize your lungs. Body armor and sandbags offer no protection from this sort of damage.
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In particular, the technology for producing nanoscale particles of aluminum, and storing them safely, has progressed
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Unclassified results from one Canadian research group suggest that it should be feasible to make warheads around five times as powerful as existing munitions without changing the ingredients.
The Russian air force lobs as many as 3,000 glide bombs at Ukraine each month:
The satellite-guided bombs range as far as 40 miles, meaning Russian fighter-bombers — Sukhoi Su-30s, Su-34s and Su-35s — can release their bombs from beyond the reach of all but the best, and rarest, Ukrainian air defenses.
The 1,100- and 2,200-pound KAB glide bombs are a “miracle weapon” for the Russians, the Ukrainian Deep State analysis group noted. And the Ukrainians have “practically no countermeasures.”
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To that end, the Ukrainian air force is transforming its 40 or 50 surviving Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters, and possibly also its dozens of remaining Sukhoi Su-27 fighters, into precision glide bombersr — by arming them with American-made Small Diameter Bombs hanging on improvised pylons.
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No one outside of the Pentagon and the Ukrainian air force knew the Ukrainians had the 290-pound SDBs — which range 69 miles under satellite guidance on pop-out wings — until photos appeared online late last month depicting a MiG-29 with six of the diminutive bombs under its wings.
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Last year, American, French and Ukrainian technicians worked together to arm Ukrainian MiG-29s and Su-27s with the U.S.-made Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range glide bomb and the French-made Armement Air-Sol Modulaire glide bomb. The JDAM-ER and AASM both weigh around 500 pounds.
The SDB has the advantage of being smaller — and may also boast greater range than either the JDAM-ER and AASM, both of which range around 40 miles under the best conditions. A single MiG or Sukhoi armed with SDSs could strike six targets in a single sortie, and do it from farther away — thus reducing the risk from Russian air defenses.
Equally importantly, the SDB costs just $40,000 per bomb. That’s around the same cost as a JDAM-ER, but a fifth the cost of an AASM.
While developing the A-12 Oxcart, which would evolve into the SR-71, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA feared the Russians were watching from space:
Across the world, at NII-88, Sergei Korolev had designed a Soviet spy satellite called Object D, but the CIA did not know what exactly it was capable of. Also under way was a follow-on espionage platform called Zenit, a modified version of the Vostok spacecraft that had been equipped with cameras to photograph American military installations from space. The Russians took great delight in rubbing what they learned in the face of the State Department. Once, using diplomatic channels, they passed a simple sketch of the exact shape of Lockheed’s top secret airplane to the CIA, whose employees were baffled as to how the enemy could have known such a thing, in view of the fact that operations personnel had been very careful to avoid the orbiting Soviet snoopers. Was there a double agent among them? The CIA, ever paranoid about KGB infiltration, worried in private that there could be a spy inside Area 51. Lovick finally figured it out: the Russians were using infrared satellites. In the desert heat, which could reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, the mock-up of the aircraft left a heat signature as it sat on the tarmac while technicians were waiting to hoist it up on the test pole. The sketch reflected that.
Napoleon arrived at the bridge at Arcole, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), just as Augereau’s attempt to capture it had been beaten off:
He ordered another attack, which stalled under heavy fire. Augereau then seized a flag and walked out fifteen paces in front of his skirmishers, saying, ‘Grenadiers, come and seek your colour.’ At that point Napoleon, surrounded by his aides-de-camp and bodyguard, grasped another flag and led the charge himself, haranguing the troops about their heroism at Lodi. For all his statements to the Directory two days earlier about not exposing himself to danger, he certainly did at Arcole. Yet it failed — the men displayed ‘extraordinary cowardice’ according to Sulkowski — and they didn’t rush the body-strewn bridge, although his aide-de-camp Colonel Muiron and others were killed on it at Napoleon’s side. During an Austrian counter-attack, Napoleon had to be bundled back into the marshy ground behind the bridge and was saved only by a charge of grenadiers. He was a brave man, but there was only so much anyone could do in the face of concentrated fire being directed by a stalwart Austrian resistance, which would continue for two more days.
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The bridge at Arcole wouldn’t be captured for another two days, by Augereau and Masséna, who returned there on the 17th, and Napoleon wasn’t present when it fell.
Precision systems that rely on GPS — such as Excalibur and GMLRS, which can be fired from US-provided M777 howitzers and HIMARS, respectively — are seeing shockingly decreased accuracy because of jamming:
Daniel Patt, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote in a statement to Congress in March that the 155mm GPS-guided Excalibur artillery shell “had a 70% efficiency rate hitting targets when first used in Ukraine” but that “after six weeks, efficiency declined to only 6% as the Russians adapted their electronic warfare systems to counter it.”
Patt added that “the peak efficiency of a new weapon system is only about 2 weeks before countermeasures emerge.” That’s valuable information for the US as it prepares for future fights.
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Earlier this week, the US Air Force announced a contract for add-on seekers for its extended-range JDAMs, the goal being to improve the JDAM to resist electronic jamming and instead lock onto the source of the jamming, targeting it.
Rather than talking about explosives, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), researchers tend to refer to “energetic materials”:
It is an umbrella term covering everything from detonators to incendiaries to rocket fuel.
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In the field of energetic materials, Reactive Materials or RMs have shown great potential for developing weapons far more effective than conventional high explosives. RMs typically consist of a material such as Teflon mixed with metal powder.
Reactive materials also make highly effective shrapnel. Normally, shrapnel is made of steel or similar material; shrapnel fragments are like miniature bullets. But reactive material shrapnel is explosive: the material can be engineered so that it starts releasing energy when it impacts an object. This makes RMs effective as anti-aircraft and antimissile warheads, as adding a little explosive power makes them much more lethal. According to one estimate, they are five times as effective against aircraft and similar targets as conventional shrapnel. They would be similarly effective as an anti-personnel weapon.
During WWII, a new type of weapon was developed known as thermite. This is a simple mixture of metal and metal oxide powder, like iron oxide and aluminum, but it burns at extremely high temperature. Impossible to extinguish once started, thermite can melt through steel plate, and commandoes used thermite charges to disable guns and heavy machinery. Reactive materials can do better than that.
Energetic Materials & Products Inc. of Round Rock, Texas, has been involved in the Air Forces’ micro-scale ordnance efforts and used the technology in a spin-off called the Tec Torch or Metal Vapor Torch. This flashlight-sized device blasts out a flame jet that cuts through metal like a hot knife through butter, slicing through a half-inch steel bar in less than a second. It has been designed as a breaching tool for police and others who need to cut through bolts, chains, and padlocks at high speed. The Tec Torch is based on reactive material technology with solid fuel and oxidizer, and is cheaper, lighter, and more compact than the traditional oxyacetylene cutting torch.
Each fuel cartridge weighs a couple of ounces and contains precisely graded particles of magnesium, aluminum, and copper oxide. This resulting flame jet burns at over three thousand degrees centigrade and has a speed of over two thousand meters a second. A rectangular carbon fiber nozzle shapes the jet into a flat blade for cutting through bars. The jet has higher energy density than a gas flame, and the cutting action is a combination of heat and abrasion by particles of metal oxide.
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A drone perching on a structure could use its own version of the Tec Torch to slice through a vital component, such as power or communication lines — or the cables supporting a suspension bridge.
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This type of technology could also be effective at puncturing pipelines, and fuel and chemical storage tanks.
The A-12 Oxcart, which would evolve into the SR-71, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), was a flying fuel tank:
It held eleven thousand gallons, which made the tanks the largest portion of the airplane. The fuel had requirements the likes of which were previously unknown. During the refueling process, which would happen in the air, at lower altitudes and lower airspeeds, the temperature of the fuel would drop to -90 degrees Fahrenheit. At Mach 3, it would heat up to 285 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which conventional fuels boil and explode. To allow for this kind of fluctuation, JP-7 was designed to maintain such a low vapor pressure that a person could not light it with a match. This made for many practical jokes, with those in the know dropping lit matches into a barrel of JP-7 to make those not in the know duck and run for cover.
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Flying at speeds of 2,200 miles per hour, an Oxcart pilot would need a 186-mile swath just to make a U-turn. This meant an additional 38,400 acres of land around the base were withdrawn from public access, allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to extend the restricted airspace from a 50-square-mile box to 440 square miles. FAA employees were instructed not to ask questions about anything flying above forty thousand feet. The same was true at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
With his acute sense for what would energize and what demoralize a unit, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon harangued Vaubois’ men after their defeat at Davidovich’s hands over five days of skirmishes in the villages of Cembra and Calliano:
‘Soldiers of the 39th and 85th Infantry, you are no longer fit to belong to the French Army. You have shown neither discipline nor courage; you have allowed the enemy to dislodge you from a position where a handful of brave men could have stopped an army. The chief-of-staff will cause to be inscribed upon your flags: “These men are no longer of the Army of Italy”.’
The disgraced Vaubois contained Davidovich at Rivoli.
Napoleon wrote a despairing letter to the Directory from Verona, effectively blaming them for his predicament:
Perhaps we are on the verge of losing Italy. None of the relief I was waiting for has arrived … I am doing my duty, the army is doing its duty. My soul is in tatters, but my conscience is at peace … The weather continues to be bad; the entire army is excessively tired and without boots … The wounded are the elite of the army; all our superior officers, all our best generals are hors de combat. Everyone who comes to me is so inept and doesn’t even have a soldier’s confidence! … We have been abandoned to the depths of Italy … Perhaps my hour … has come. I no longer dare expose myself as my death would discourage the troops.
Two thousand pounds, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), has long been the standard bomb size deemed necessary for destroying structures made of reinforced concrete:
If you lay explosives by hand, about two hundred pounds of well-placed C4 will do the job of a two-thousand pound bomb.
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The M150 Penetrating Augmented Munition (PAM) is a portable demolition device weighing just forty-two pounds. First introduced in 1998, it is highly effective against reinforced concrete structures. When triggered it goes through a complex, four-stage firing process that is like a speeded-up version of the miner’s approach of drilling and blasting.
PAM’s first charge punches a tunnel deep into the target. The subsequent stages cut through any steel reinforcing bars, propel a powerful explosive charge into the tunnel, and detonate it. Concrete is strong in compression, but weak in tension. It is almost impossible to crush a concrete block, but comparatively easy to tear it apart from inside. That’s how PAM can replace a two-hundred pound charge of C-4, or the warhead on a 2,000-pound bomb, and demolish a reinforced concrete structure such as a bridge support measuring fifteen feet by five by six. It would take a team of seven about three hours to rig a target with C4 explosives for demolition, whereas with PAM, the same process takes about two man-minutes.
The A-12, which would evolve into the SR-71, would beat Soviet advances in radar technology in three fields, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), height, speed, and stealth:
The airplane needed to fly at ninety thousand feet and at a remarkably unprecedented speed of twenty-three hundred miles per hour, or Mach 3. In the late 1950s, for an aircraft to leave the tarmac on its own power and sustain even Mach 2 flight was unheard-of. Speed offered cover. In the event that a Mach 3 aircraft was tracked by radar, that kind of speed would make it extremely difficult to shoot down. By comparison, a U-2, which flew around five hundred miles per hour, would be seen by a Soviet SA-2 missile system approximately ten minutes before it was in shoot-down range, where it would remain for a full five minutes. An aircraft traveling at Mach 3 would be seen by Soviet radar for fewer than a hundred and twenty seconds before it could be fired upon, and it would remain in target range for fewer than twenty seconds. After that twenty-second window closed, the airplane would be too close for a Soviet missile to fire on it. The missile couldn’t chase the airplane because, even though the top speed for a missile at the time was Mach 3.5, once a missile gets that far into the upper atmosphere, it loses precision and speed. Shooting down an airplane flying at three times the speed of sound at ninety thousand feet was equivalent to hitting a bullet whizzing by seventeen miles away with another bullet.
Stealth was still a very new technology:
“Radar works analogous to a bat,” Lovick explains. “The bat squeaks and the sound hits a bug. The squeak gets sent back to the bat and the bat measures time and distance to the bug through the echo it receives.” So how does one get the bug to absorb the squeak? “The way in which to solve the radar problem for us at Lockheed was to create a surface that would redirect radar returns. We needed to send them off in a direction other than back at the Soviet radars. We could also do this by absorbing radar returns, like a diaper absorbs liquid. In theory it was simple. But it turned out to be quite a complicated problem to solve.”
Lovick had been solving problems ever since he was a child growing up in Falls City, Nebraska, during the Depression—for instance, the time he wanted to learn to play the piano but did not want to disturb his family while he practiced. “I took the piano apart and reconfigured its parts to suppress the sound. Then I sent the vibrations from the strings electronically through a small amplifier to a headset I wore.” This was hardly something most fourteen-year-old children were doing in 1933. Four years later, at the age of eighteen, Lovick published his first article on radar, for Radio-Craft magazine. Inspired to think he might have a career in radar technology, he wrote to Lockheed Corporation in faraway California asking for a job. Lockheed turned him down. So he took a minimum-wage job as a radio repairman at a local Montgomery Ward, something that, at the age of ninety-one, he still considers a serendipitous career move. “What I learned at Montgomery Ward, in an employment capacity that today some might perceive as a dead-end job, would later play an important role in my future spy plane career.” Namely, that there is as much to learn from what doesn’t work as from what does.
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“An anechoic chamber is an enclosed space covered in energy-absorbing materials, the by-product of which is noiselessness,” Lovick explains. It is so quiet inside the chamber that if a person stands alone inside its four walls, he can hear the blood flowing inside his body. “Particularly loud is the blood in one’s head,” Lovick notes. Only in such a strictly controlled environment could the physicist and his team accurately test how a one-twentieth-scale model would react to radar beams aimed at it. Lockheed’s wood shop built tiny airplane models for the physicists, not unlike the models kids play with. Lovick and the team painstakingly applied radar-absorbing material to the models then strung them up in the anechoic chamber to test. Based on the radar echo results, the shape and design of the spy plane would change. So would its name. Over the next several months, the design numbers for the Archangel-1 went up incrementally, through eleven major changes. This is why the final and official Agency designation for the airplane was Archangel-12, or A-12 for short.
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With the plane’s underbelly now flat, its radar cross section was reduced by an astonishing 90 percent.
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“On 31 March we started to build a full scale mockup and elevation device to raise the mockup 50 feet in the air for radar tests,” Johnson wrote in documents declassified in July 2007. What Johnson was imagining in this “elevation device” would eventually become the legendary Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole.
Lockheed engineers brought with them a mock-up of the aircraft so detailed that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing. For accurate radar results, the model had to represent everything the real aircraft would be, from the size of the rivets to the slope on the chines. It had taken more than four months to build. When it was done, the wooden airplane, with its 102-foot-long fuselage and 55-foot-long wooden wings, was packed up in a wooden crate in preparation for its journey out to Area 51. Getting it there was a daunting task, and the road from Burbank to Area 51 needed to be prepared in advance. The transport crate had been disguised to look like a generic wide load, but the size made it considerably wider than wide. Crews were dispatched before the trip to remove obstructing road signs and to trim overhanging trees. In a few places along the highway, the road had to be made level.
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Each member of Lovick’s crew carried in his pocket a small chart indicating Soviet satellite schedules. This often meant working odd hours, including at night. “It also made for a lot of technicians running around,” Lovick explains. “Satellites passed overhead often. Getting an aircraft up on the radar test pole took eighteen minutes. It took another eighteen minutes to get it back down. That left only a set amount of time to shoot radar at it and take data recordings.” As soon as technicians were done, they took the aircraft down and whisked it away into its hangar.
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At night, workers needed to bundle up in heavy coats and wool hats. But during the day, temperatures could reach 120 degrees. “Once, I saw a coyote chasing a rabbit and they were both walking,” Lovick recalls.
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Bissell had been informed that Lockheed’s A-12 would appear on enemy radar as bigger than a bird but smaller than a man. But he had not yet been told about a problem in the aircraft’s low observables that Lovick and the team had been unable to remedy while testing the mock-up out at Area 51. Lovick explains: “The exhaust ducts from the two huge jet engines that powered the aircraft were proving impossible to make stealthy. Obviously, we couldn’t cover the openings with camouflage coating. During testing, the radar waves would go into the spaces where the engines would be, echo around, and come out like water being sprayed into a can. We’d tried screens and metallic grating. Nothing worked.”
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There in the conference room, Edward Lovick decided to speak up about an idea he had been considering for decades, “and that was how to ionize gas,” he says, referring to the scientific process by which the electrical charge of an atom is fundamentally changed. “I suggested that by adding the chemical compound cesium to the fuel, the exhaust would be ionized, likely masking it from radar. I had suggested cesium would be the best source of free electrons because, in the gaseous state, it would be the easiest to ionize.” If this complicated ionization worked—and Lovick believed it would—the results would be like putting a sponge in a can and running a hose into it. Instead of being bounced back, the radar return from the engines would be absorbed. “Bissell loved the idea,” says Lovick, adding that the suggestion was endorsed heartily by several of the customer’s consultants. An enthusiastic discussion ensued among the president’s science advisers, whom Lovick sensed had very little understanding of what it was he was proposing. In the end, the results would be up to Lovick to determine; later, his theory indeed proved correct. Those results remain a key component of stealth and are still classified as of 2011.
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Lockheed kept the contract. Lovick got a huge Christmas bonus, and the A-12 got a code name, Oxcart. It was ironic, an oxcart being one of the slowest vehicles on Earth and the Oxcart being the fastest.
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The aircraft was going to be five times faster than the U-2 and would fly a full three miles higher than the U-2.
Napoleon relied a good deal on intelligence in his campaigns, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), which he insisted on analyzing personally rather than getting through staff officers:
Methods of gaining intelligence included interrogating deserters and prisoners, sending out cavalry patrols, and even dressing soldiers as farm labourers after having taken the real labourers’ wives hostage. Napoleon was conscious of the way that spies and officers on scouting missions could mistake corps for detachments and vice versa and often repeated what they had heard from ‘panic-stricken or surprised people’ rather than what they had witnessed. His orders for his intelligence officers were: ‘To reconnoitre accurately defiles and fords of every description. To provide guides that may be depended upon. To interrogate the priest and the postmaster. To establish rapidly a good understanding with the inhabitants. To send out spies. To intercept public and private letters … In short, to be able to answer every question of the general-in-chief when he arrives at the head of the army.’
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He himself then moved continually between Brescia, Castelnuovo, Desenzano, Roverbella, Castiglione, Goito and Peschiera, taking his mobile headquarters to wherever gave him the best idea of the way the campaign was progressing. This constant activity in the often severe heat led to his losing five horses to exhaustion in quick succession. One of his Polish aides-de-camp, Dezydery Adam Chlapowski, recalled that he ‘never used his spurs or knees to make his horse gallop, but always applied his whip’.
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The Austrians pushed on boldly and took Rivoli. ‘We shall recover tomorrow, or afterwards, what you have lost today,’ Napoleon reassured Masséna. ‘Nothing is lost while courage remains.’ On July 30, however, in an operation known as the ‘Surprise of Brescia’, the Austrians captured Brescia’s garrison and hospitals with only three killed and eleven wounded. The sick included Murat (who had caught venereal disease from a Madame Rugat), Lannes and Kellermann’s brilliant cavalryman son, François-Étienne. Josephine, who had gone to Brescia from Milan at Napoleon’s request as he had considered the city safely behind the lines, was nearly captured, prompting Napoleon to swear, ‘Wurmser shall pay dearly for those tears.’
‘We’ve suffered some setbacks,’ Napoleon acknowledged to the Directory, while sending all non-essential equipment to the rear.
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His order to Augereau to retreat to Roverbella read: ‘Every moment is precious … The enemy has broken through our line at three places: he is master of the important points of Corona and Rivoli … You will see that our communications with Milan and Verona have been cut. Await new orders at Roverbella; I will go there in person.’
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Ending the siege of Mantua involved abandoning no fewer than 179 cannon and mortars that couldn’t be removed, and dumping their ammunition in the lakes. It pained Napoleon to do this, but he knew that decisive victories in the field, not fortresses, were the key to modern warfare. ‘Whatever happens, and however much it costs, we must sleep in Brescia tomorrow,’ he told Masséna.
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When Sauret’s men complained they were hungry, Napoleon told them they could find food in the enemy camp.
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On the morning of August 4, Napoleon was at Lonato with only 1,200 men when more than 3,000 lost Austrians, who had been cut off from Quasdanovich’s command, suddenly blundered into the town. Napoleon calmly informed their parlementaire (officer sent to parley) that his ‘whole army’ was present, and that ‘If in eight minutes his division had not laid down its arms, I would not spare a man.’ He supported this ruse by issuing orders to Berthier about grenadier and artillery units that Berthier knew were entirely bogus. The Austrians only discovered once they had surrendered and been disarmed that there were no French forces nearby, and that they could have captured Napoleon with ease.
The US Army sent four Stryker-mounted 50-kilowatt laser prototypes to the Middle East to test against aerial threats:
“What we’re finding is where the challenges are with directed energy at different power levels,” Bush told members of the Senate Appropriations airland subcommittee on Wednesday. “That [50-kilowatt] power level is proving challenging to incorporate into a vehicle that has to move around constantly — the heat dissipation, the amount of electronics, kind of the wear and tear of a vehicle in a tactical environment versus a fixed site.”
Dubbed the Directed Energy Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD), the service tasked Kord Technologies with integrating a 50-kilowatt class RTX laser onto a Stryker to down class one to three aerial drones and incoming rockets, artillery and mortars. In total, four prototypes were produced, and Breaking Defense first reported that all four were sent to the US Central Command (CENTCOM) region in February.
Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus said at the time that the goal was to experiment in a live environment complete with weather challenges and dust storms that can alter light particles and degrade beam quality.
“You may have a 50-kilowatt laser, [but] at 10 kilometers can you put at least four kilowatts in a centimeter square because … that’s what you need to burn through a quarter inch steel plate?” the three-star general asked. “But that’s really hard to get … from a big beam to get the small portion of it on the exact spot to be able to burn at that high intensity and any kind of dust particle or that starts to disrupt that.”
As impossible as it is to imagine now, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), in the early days of atomic testing there was no such thing as a HAZMAT suit:
Instead, workers combed the desert floor dressed in white lab coats and work boots, looking for particles of nuclear fallout. According to Atomic Energy Commission documents made public in 1993, this radioactive debris varied in size, from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel.
Much to the surprise of the nuclear scientists, the atomic weapons tests revealed that sometimes, in the first milliseconds of destruction, the atomic energy actually jettisoned splintered pieces of the bomb tower away from the intense heat, intact, before vaporization could occur. These highly radioactive pieces were then carried aloft in the clouds and deposited down on places like Groom Lake, and Atomic Energy Commission workers could then locate them with magnets.
As a rule, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the educated, professional and secularized elites were more likely to regard Napoleon as a liberating force than the Catholic peasantry, who saw the French armies as foreign atheists:
Wishing to appear as an enlightened liberator, rather than just the latest in a long line of conquerors, Napoleon held out the hope of an eventually independent, unified nation-state and thereby kindled the sparks of Italian nationalism. To that end, the day after his arrival in Milan, he declared the creation of a Lombardic Republic. It would be governed by Italian pro-French giacobini (Jacobins, or ‘patriots’) and he encouraged political clubs to mushroom throughout the region (the one in Milan soon included eight hundred lawyers and merchants). He also abolished Austrian governing institutions, reformed Pavia University, held provisional municipal elections, founded a National Guard and conferred with the leading Milanese advocate of Italian unification, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, to whom he handed over as much power as possible.
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Lombardy was now a theoretically independent republic, albeit now a French protectorate, but the Veneto was still an Austrian province and Mantua was occupied by the Austrian army. Tuscany, Modena, Lucca and Parma were ruled by Austrian dukes and grand dukes; the Papal States (Bologna, Romagna, Ferrara, Umbria) were owned by the Pope; Naples and Sicily formed a single kingdom (the Two Sicilies) ruled by the Bourbon Ferdinand IV, and the Savoyard monarchy still reigned in Piedmont and Sardinia.
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Over the course of the next three years, known as the triennio, Italians saw the emergence of the giacobini in a series of ‘sister-republics’ that Napoleon was to set up. He wanted to establish a new Italian political culture based on the French Revolution that would prize meritocracy, nationhood and free-thinking over privilege, city-state localism and Tridentine Catholicism.
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Reforms that Napoleon imposed on the newly conquered territories included the abolition of internal tariffs, which helped to stimulate economic development, the ending of noble assemblies and other centres of feudal privilege, financial restructurings aimed at bringing down state debt, ending the restrictive guild system, imposing religious toleration, closing the ghettos and allowing Jews to live anywhere, and sometimes nationalizing Church property.
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As zealous leaders of what they truly considered to be a new form of civilization — although the actual word ‘civilization’ itself had only entered the French lexicon in the 1760s and was very little used in the Napoleonic era — the French revolutionary elites genuinely believed they were advancing the welfare of Europe under French leadership.
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‘All men of genius, everyone distinguished in the republic of letters, is French, whatever his nationality,’ Napoleon wrote from Milan in May 1796 to the eminent Italian astronomer Barnaba Oriani. ‘Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if … priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.’
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On May 23 a revolt against the French occupation in Pavia led by Catholic priests was put down harshly by Lannes, who simply shot the town council.
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‘As I was half way to Pavia, we met a thousand peasants at Binasco and defeated them,’ Napoleon reported to Berthier. ‘After killing one hundred of them we burned the village, setting a terrible but efficient example.’
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Napoleon believed that ‘bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine’, but he also thought that quick and certain punishments meant that large-scale repression could largely be avoided.
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‘If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’
During the Pavia revolt, which spread over much of Lombardy, five hundred hostages from some of the richest local families were taken to France as ‘state prisoners’ to ensure good behaviour. In the country around Tortona, Napoleon destroyed all the church bells that had been used to summon the revolt, and had no hesitation in shooting any village priest caught leading peasant bands.