Trying to survive ---- after a nuclear war

Most of the world's biggest, best known and best regarded writers and pundits live in big cities like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Moscow and they consider it pure nonsense that anyone would survive the direct effects of an all-out nuclear war.

For residents of such global cities, such as themselves, this is undoubtedly so.

But for the rest of us, the peons living outside these cities' various Beltways, we are more likely to die slow lingering painful deaths.

Not from radiation fallout, at least not in the medium short term.

And maybe not from nuclear winter.

But certainly from the massive disruption that an all-out nuclear war would cause to a world grown so dependent upon interconnected networks of huge, highly complicated, machines and the factories that make them.

The energy equipment inside electrical power plants and oil refineries in particular.

Those machines are only made in a few huge factories worldwide, mostly in the metropolitan areas of global cities, of the sort most likely to be bombed in an all-out nuclear war.

So many of these huge machines and many of the huge factories that make them will be destroyed in the nuclear war and the network grids of interconnectedness that sustains our modern global civilization will be totally disrupted until their damage is repaired.

And therein lies the rub.

(And let us not forget that the manufacture and transport to their site of use of these huge machines is also dependent on inputs from other huge machines/huge factories that are also likely to be largely destroyed or left without any fuel.)

Because the manufacture and transport and assemble of all these various machines depends upon electricity and petroleum products made by the very machines we are trying to re-build !

Such is the deadly Catch 22 situation arising from an unquestioning belief in the mantra that "bigger is ever better" bleated out daily by such as The Economist magazine.

Meanwhile, blast and radiation injuries and disruptions in food, heat and sanitation systems would be giving us a huge new burden of seriously infected patients.

But the production of antibiotics is even more centralized than the manufacture of power plant turbines and oil refinery cat converters.

A few big plants in India and China make all the basic (and natural) penicillin G from which most of the other beta-lactam antibiotics are semi-synthesized.

During almost all of WWII, the world's penicillin was basically made home-made or artisan style in extremely low tech ad hoc factories using molds in small flat bottles, growing on the surface of shallow pools of water infused with fungus food.

Only Pfizer (from mid 1944) and a few other drug companies in America (1945 onwards) began making it with yeast penicillium fungus inside the "deep tank" machines much like those seen today - a process close to how we make beer.

But research efforts on improving the natural output of penicillin from the mold style penicillium fungus used in the low tech set-ups had already been dropped by 1944 and instead was turned exclusively to increasing the yield from the yeast style penicillium fungus.

We could easily return to low tech "good enough for a global crisis" artisan penicillin today if we had to, even after a nuclear war and winter - it is basically kitchen table top technology.

However, the best of the surface-growing penicillium types available today (from museums of fungus collections !) would only yield penicillin at about 200 times less than what the deep tank process would yield, from the same amount of now scarce fungus food inputs.

Pandemic diseases, I believe, would kill most in the world, after even an all-out nuclear exchange.

We humans must move beyond simply expanding the diversity of our biological portfolio.

It is very important that we also begin making resilient, more flexible, smaller forms of low tech "good enough" technology.

And then redundantly storing the knowledge gained and new basic tools needed to do so.

All to protect us in the event that we fall into a catch 22 situation from having only a few big city based factories making all the complicated energy equipment that in turn bootstraps all the rest of our economy above it.

Amazingly fast, the world's electric utilities - private and public - accepted evidence that a single extraordinary bolt of strong electricity from the Sun might knock out most of the huge transformers that regulate the global electrical grid, leaving us no power production to make new transformers and hence no way to get electricity flowing again.

They are moving to increase resilience and redundancy.

But it is only half a solution - we need to find small simple natural artisan ways to increase the diversity of technologies needed for continued life on an unpredictable planet....

"Homemade Hope" : "the least of these" saved "the least of these"

Like H.P. Lovecraft, Adolf Hitler could think of no greater symbol of evil than the fungoid growth, which they both saw as silently and secretively rotting normal healthy life from within.

And as is well known, Hitler considered all the Jews to be fungoid growths.

We must remember he meant it literally, to be taken as a new but fully scientific metaphor, just as the originally exclusively biological term 'fission' became extended to also mean 'nuclear fission'.

How long then would Lovecraft and Hitler have both raged to learn the details of Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project.

The slimy beginnings of our Age of Antibiotics

For the tiny project took the metabolic excrement of a despised household pest the penicillium fungoid growth, had it extracted by another 'fungoid growth' (the German-born Jewish biochemist Karl Meyer) and finally injected it to try and save the life of yet another 'fungoid growth', American born Jew Charles Aronson !

And thus began, on October 16th 1940 in New York City, our current Age of Antibiotics.

Henry Dawson deliberately set out, I am sure, to put the cat among the Allied medical pigeons.

Because it is clear he ventured deep into two areas of science he knew nothing about, all to better make his point.

First, he chose to ignore the general consensus it was better to wait for crystal pure, patented, synthetic commercial penicillin. Just as well really, since seventy five years on, it still has never come through.

He knew nothing about fungus, let alone making fungus juice in massive pilot plant quantities on the simpliest of equipment under the most awkward of conditions.

Dawson then broke a twelve year world wide medical taboo and injected this excrement of these slimy despised molds (the lowest of the low, the least of these in the natural world) into a human patient's bloodstream.

Next, the patients he selected were working class youths, one Jewish and the other Black, who were dying of SBE - the heart disease that made Rheumatic Fever then the leading killer of school age kids.

SBE patients had already been mentally condemned by the Allied medical elite, to a death by deliberate neglect if war circumstances meant lifesaving medicine had to be rationed.

The SBEs were the lowest of the low, the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the least of these.

They were also, as heart patients, light years away from his day job speciality - the out patient treatment of chronic arthritis sufferers.

But Dawson badly wanted the Allies to change their war aims with regard to the little and disregarded and he correctly guessed that a very public fight over both treating the SBEs and and treating them with natural penicillin might just do it.


Allied war aims - prove them up or go home !

He wanted the Allies to mass produce natural penicillin, with the help of the humble fungus, during the war itself, to help all those in the world dying for lack of it --- for once to render concrete the Allies' high sounding but very hollow war aims claims.

The Allies intended instead to sharply limit penicillin's wartime production and to secretly limit its availability.

It's miracle cures were to be kept as secret as possible, until after D-Day when it use among lightly wounded Allied frontline troops would let them return to combat before the German wounded and hence provide a manpower edge.

The dying doctor Dawson held off his own body and his own government long enough to see the Allies drop their position and take up his - in the end bombers were pulled off missions to bomb and burn little children to deliver penicillin to other little children.

The homemadeness proved more important than the hope ...

However, seventy five years on, we do not really see the discarded people Dawson helped to save.

All we recall now is that the humblest and most despised of God's creatures came forth, in the darkest hours of WWII, to rescue us from the violence that the best in human civilization could devise.

When the finest in European civilizations gassed and burned all our faith in the ovens of Auschwitz, the smallest of beings, in the smallest and humblest of kitchen table settings, produced the homemade hope that restored our faith again.

For it was perhaps the unexpected elevation of the despised penicillium mold, together with the elevation of the then also despised status of the homemade, the amateur, the DIY project, the artisan and the natural that most challenged the certitudes of 'bigger is ever better' Progress.

Even after the war was over and plenty of penicillin was at hand to once again treat the SBEs....

industrial Auschwitz vs artisan Penicillin

Dr Josef Mengele'e wartime efforts, aided by an assist from Dr Robert Oppenheimer, almost immediately knocked human-oriented Progress permanently off its pre-war pedestal, as every account of the birth of our post-war/post-modern Era attests.

But would it be heresy to suggest that in the same period, albeit rolled out at a much slower pace, Dr Henry Dawson offered up an sturdy alternative to pre-war progress ?

That is 'out with the old' was as successful as it was, because there was an 'in with the new' alternative waiting in the wings ?

And I do mean 'Alternative' in just the sense that left wingers and right wingers understand that term : Birkenstocks and whole grain bread and all.

Dawson's successful attempts to get the Allies to reverse their war aims for penicillin, from a "secret weapon of war" to "abundant wartime penicillin for all in need", began small and simple and natural.

Writers Hitler, A. and Lovecraft, H.P. thought the ultimate in evil was a fungoid growth.

But 'the other Manhattan Project' took up the despised little creature.

Eventually it, together with "4Fs,Women and the Grace of God", to use a description from a hostile OSRD critic, changed our whole world for the better, for ever.

Not just in what it did ---- but in how it did it, so very different in an era of Big Everything, particularly Big Science:

Un-patented, public domain, back-to-the-land, back-to-nature, small-is-bountiful penicillin.

Kitchen Tabletop penicillin, Homemade penicillin, DIY penicillin, Artisan penicillin, Crude and Primitive penicillin.

Penicillin you could almost imagine being at farmers' markets, or sold from a table at the back of the hall, after the gig....