Chapter 1 | I Don’t Know About You, But I’d Swear Beirut Was Just Nuked!

I don’t know about you, but when I saw this video of the massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, on 4 August 2020, I immediately knew in my gut that this was a nuclear explosion.

 

 

I decided to tweet my alarm to all those following me on Twitter:

In addition to the sheer force of the blast, I was most struck by the amazing “Wilson cloud” that I had seen a few times in photos and videos of nuclear explosions. 

 

Conventional (i.e., non-nuclear) explosions can also cause these fleeting condensation clouds in humid environments. See, for example, the classic Wilson cloud at 00:15 in this video of the detonation of a 10,000 lb M121 bomb using TNT as the explosive with an M1 fuze extender to provide for 3-foot height of burst being used in Vietnam.

 

 

But my gut feeling was that such a massive explosion combined with a Wilson cloud had to be nuclear.

I was surely not the only one on Twitter whose first reaction to the video of the Beirut blast was that it sure did LOOK like a nuclear blast. But interestingly very few tweets actually raised the question of whether the Beirut explosion might have ACTUALLY been a nuclear event, as if to even suggest such a thing would have been thought preposterous.

I personally had no qualms about publicly suggesting Beirut was nuked because—following my discovery of the work of Heinz Pommer, Dimitri Khalezov, and Joe Vialls in December 2018 to be discussed in the next chapter—I had been publicly raising questions about the “official” explanation for 9/11 and quite a few other major “terrorist” explosions that had occurred over the past forty years, suggesting they might have ALL been nuclear events. And that included two earlier events in Beirut itself: the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing & the 2005 Hariri assassination. Thus it was not as big a leap for me to be open to the idea that August 4th was a nuclear event as it might have been for someone who firmly believed that the last time that nuclear weapons had been used against a people and & their nation was 75 years previously in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Equally as important for me in suggesting the possibility that the August 4th Beirut explosion was a nuclear event was to open people’s eyes once again to the possibility that Beirut was NOT an isolated event. It was quite possible that all of these major explosions were connected. Toward that end, as part of the same August 4th thread, I retweeted some of my earlier tweets.

I had been on Twitter since August 2017 and by August 2020 I had built up a following of about 45,000 followers. Because I thought of myself more as a member of a potential #truth community than an opinion leader, I followed back practically as many tweeters who followed me. Most of what I did on Twitter was simply retweeting any tweet I found interesting but I also tweeted my own summaries of interesting articles, videos & books in Twitter threads. Although I rarely expressed my own opinion in these tweets & retweets, I am sure my opinion showed in my choice of subject matter that typically challenged mainstream media (#MSM) orthodoxy on issues like 9/11; the JFK, RFK & MLK assassinations; Israel & Zionism; US foreign policy; and, since March 2020, Covid-19.

Despite officially having 45K followers, I did not know & still do not know how many people actually read my tweets. I did notice that when I tweeted something under my own name (in contrast to retweeting someone else’s tweet under their name) I could occasionally get a significant number of comments, likes and retweets. For example, the tweet (above) on the video of a likely neutron bomb blast in Yemen garnered 1.1K likes and 1.6K retweets. More normal was the 196 likes and 184 retweets that my August 4th Beirut nuclear alert received.

Among my 45K followers I had noted several whom I would call alternative media personalities whose followers typically far outnumbered those they followed. The personalities that followed me were ones I had often retweeted although I noticed that they NEVER retweeted, liked or replied to anything I tweeted. I also observed that although we seemed to have shared points of view about challenging #MSM orthodoxy on certain topics, they tended to be much more selective on the part of the #MSM orthodoxy they challenged. For example, #911Truth advocates did not generally challenge Covid-19 orthodoxy and #Covid19Truth advocates did not generally challenge 9/11 orthodoxy. And whether a #911Truth or #Covid19Truth or any other kind of #truth advocate, if they did challenge 9/11 orthodoxy, they stuck to the arguments of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (@AE911Truth) and never ventured into the seemingly “third rail” topic of the possible role of nuclear devices on 9/11 that I had so often tweeted about since December 2018.

Although there may be many reasons why someone would want to avoid certain topics or interpretations, I started thinking and just began assuming that all of these social media personalities I was retweeting—and thus promoting—were “limited hangouts” in one way or another, for whatever reason. By limited hangout I mean that they might actively promote #truth with their interpretations of certain issues but there were other interpretations & issues where they just would not go no matter how much evidence and logic I could bring to the fore.

And one topic I knew in my gut would bring a deadly silence from these social media personalities was the suggestion that they should take seriously the notion that some massive explosion like that we saw in Beirut on 4 August 2020 was a NUCLEAR explosion. As to WHY they would all shy away from considering any role for nuclear weapons in the Beirut explosion—and indeed any major explosion—all I will say at this point is that it was and is still simply a taboo subject, seemingly akin to questioning “the Holocaust” orthodoxy.

And to reinforce the taboo, within hours of the Beirut blast, as if on cue, the so-called “fact checkers” at Vice, Lead Stories, Business Insider and Task & Purpose—all neatly packaged by Twitter Events—were out in force universally concluding that the Beirut explosion was most definitely NOT a nuclear blast.

 

https://twitter.com/i/events/1290795105931026437

 

https://taskandpurpose.com/analysis/beirut-explosion-nuclear-blast-debunked/

As to why these so-called “fact checkers” were so busy denying the idea that the Beirut blast could have been nuclear, Vice wrote:

Running such speculation is highly irresponsible. This is how conspiracy theories are born and spread. In speaking with Open Source Intelligence and nuclear experts this afternoon, everyone urged caution. The real experts are pouring over the data, constantly reminding me they aren’t sure and that they’re only sharing their best guesses based on the available information.

Among the “highly irresponsible” speculators, Lead Stories & Vice pointed to a tweet/article from Veterans Today. (Vice did not actually mention Veterans Today by name, referring only to a “fringe website” with its “nuclear expert, Jeff Smith of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”) 

https://web.archive.org/web/20200804161014/https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/08/04/breaking-israel-nukes-beirut/

Vice also pointed out the titillating title “Did A Nuke Just Go Off in Beirut? Terrifying Mystery Blast Shockwave Filmed Over Beirut” from an article at zerohedge.com.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200804155335/https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-nuke-just-go-beirut-terrifying-mystery-blast-shockwave-filmed-over-lebanon

But most of the attack on the nuclear hypothesis focused on a couple of tweets from former ESPN reporter Chris Palmer @ChrisPalmerNBA that businessinsider.com wrote had “accumulated thousands of likes and reshares before it was deleted.”

 

The “fact checkers” generally started their critique by stating, as Task & Purpose put it,

The main reason why some conspiracy-minded individuals are leaping to the conclusion that a nuke went off in Beirut is that explosion produced a classic mushroom cloud, which is familiar to anyone who as seen video or images of nuclear detonations.

Just to be clear, Task & Purpose included the image of “a classic mushroom cloud” from Beirut that they had in mind.

Task & Purpose is certainly correct that many people might indeed call this formation a “mushroom cloud” which, as they add, is “familiar to anyone who has seen video or images of nuclear detonations.” And Task & Purpose, like all the other “fact checkers,” are also quite correct that the existence of such a “mushroom cloud” does not in itself prove that the explosion was “an atomic bomb” as Chris Palmer seems to suggest.

Vice quoted “experts” to make the case that the appearance of a “mushroom cloud” does not prove that a nuclear blast occurred, mentioning explosions at a 2008 Texas oil refinery, 2013 Texas fertilizer plant (pictured below) and 2019 Philadelphia refinery that produced “mushroom clouds.”

However, I think these “fact checkers” focusing on this “mushroom cloud” is a “strawman” fallacy because (1) none of the people suggesting Beirut might have been nuked actually focused on the mushroom cloud which wasn’t especially depicted in any of the videos; (2) the presence of a mushroom cloud does NOT disprove that Beirut was a nuclear event.

As I have already noted, I certainly wasn’t struck in the video I saw of any “mushroom cloud.” The image that struck me and almost everybody else immediately was the “Wilson cloud”, quite distinct from what almost everybody thinks of as a mushroom cloud.

Although viewers would likely have seen a “classic mushroom cloud” like that which appeared over Beirut following the explosion, I don’t think they thought it was that unusual because they had probably seen video of clouds that looked at least something like the Beirut cloud before without thinking it HAD to be due to a nuclear blast. But I doubt whether hardly anybody had ever seen such a Wilson cloud before. And for all of us it was the Wilson cloud which got our attention and led us thinking this might be a nuclear explosion.

Furthermore the “conspiracy-minded individuals” that Task & Purpose links to (in actuality the link is only to the @ChrisPalmerNBA tweet) does not use the photo of any such “classic mushroom cloud.” Although Palmer does indeed use the term “mushroom cloud”, the image he tweets is actually the fireball and the beginnings of the Wilson cloud (that one sees on the video above) that looks nothing like the “classic mushroom cloud” that Task & Purpose depicts.

As for @zerohedge, they did not even use the term “mushroom cloud” in their tweet and their image is clearly a fully formed Wilson cloud.

Indeed several of the “fact checkers” like Vice & Lead Stories that follow the same “mushroom cloud” critique only show images or videos of the dramatic formation of the Wilson cloud, not the later “classic mushroom cloud.”

Since the formation of this “classic mushroom cloud” does NOT prove that the Beirut explosion was NOT a nuclear event, the “fact checkers” turn to other arguments in order to state emphatically, as Vice puts it, “We can, however, be damn sure that it wasn’t a nuke. But that’s not stopping some from speculating wildly.”

Each of the “fact checkers” in a classic “appeal to authority” reported the opinions of a COUPLE of “experts” with whom they had either been in direct communication and/or found on Twitter to make a sweeping conclusion about ALL “experts.” “But the explosion in Beirut wasn’t atomic, according to experts who would surely know.” (Vice) “Experts do not believe Tuesday’s explosion was a nuclear detonation.” (Task & Purpose) “Experts who study nuclear weapons quickly and unequivocally rejected the idea that Beirut had been hit with a nuclear bomb,” (Business Insider)

As to who these “experts” are, what “authority” they had, and what arguments they used, some were like Dr. Jeffrey Lewis (Lead Stories, Vice), director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, who tweeted an amazingly sweeping statement with no supporting evidence (apart from some images of the Beirut explosion) that “There are literally none of the phenomena one sees with a nuclear explosion.”

Based on this tweet from @ArmsControlWonk, the rather notorious (at least in #truther circles) Bellingcat asserted “We can, however, state with confidence that this was not a nuclear blast.”

Another argument against a nuclear explosion, as Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Task & Purpose was the lack of “any bright radiation flash that you would get from a nuclear event.”

Business Insider found a Twitter thread by “Martin Pfeiffer, a doctoral candidate [in Anthropology] at the University of New Mexico who researches the human history of nuclear weapons” who tweeted that a nuke would have had a “blinding white flash.”

Lead Stories & Vice both referenced Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, who similarly had tweeted that “the color of the explosion (deep red/orange)” proves that it was “not hot enough to be nuclear (which always starts white/yellow, even small nukes).”

https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1290691665401909248

Wellerstein added further detail in a written explanation to Lead Stories:

It is homogenous — one big explosion — as opposed to the ‘rippled’ look that explosions made up of small caches of material can look like (which is evident in the early frames of the Beirut explosion). The heat of a nuclear fireball, even a small one, is orders of magnitude hotter than the heat of a conventional explosion. In every nuclear detonation that is not underground, you will see an unmistakable blinding flash of white light, and the fireball will stay very white/yellow for a long time. At Beirut, what we see is a fireball that is made up of deep reds and oranges, indicating both that it is a lot cooler than a nuclear fireball, but also corroborating the idea that it probably has nitrates as its cause.
 

As we will see, it is an interesting qualification that Wellerstein makes about “in every nuclear detonation that is not underground” (emphasis added). What, indeed, would he expect if the explosion WAS indeed underground?

Several “fact checkers” mentioned the lack of reports of radiation as a further argument against any nuclear event in Beirut. Ed Lyman, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Task & Purpose “If this were a nuclear explosion there would be many other effects – high radiation levels being only one of them — that were not present,” Lyman said. “There would be reports of radiation injuries far from the blast site.” Other “fact checkers” made similar comments without citing any particular authority. “If the Beirut blast had been a nuclear explosion, one would expect to see reports of associated radiation and radiation injuries. There have been no such reports.” (Lead Stories) “No reports suggest there was radioactive fallout after the Beirut blast, which would have been quickly detected.” (Business Insider)

In addition to summarily refuting the case that the August 2020 Beirut explosion was a nuclear event, Twitter Events as early as the day of the explosion,  employing tweets from blue-checked tweeters, turned to the “authority” of Lebanese officials to make the case that the actual cause of the explosion was 2,750 “tons” of ammonium nitrate that was stored in a warehouse at the port of Beirut. “Tons” is in quotation marks because there is some confusion in the reporting as to whether the number quoted refers to “US tons” or “metric tons” (what the British call “tonnes”). One assumes Lebanese officials would mean “tons” in the sense of “metric tons” but U.S. media who usually mean “tons” in the sense of “US tons” reported the same numbers without any clarification. Since the units are not identical (1 US ton = .907 metric ton), it would seem to be important to make such a distinction but no media source bothered to clarify, suggesting they did not think the exact number mattered that much. Reports that came out in the days that followed (like these examples from Times of Israel and CNN) more specifically referred to 2,750 “tonnes” or “metric tons.”

 

It is interesting that, whether it was due to the arguments of these “fact checkers & experts” or some other reason, @zerohedge quickly deleted their “Did A Nuke Just Go Off in Beirut?” tweet and changed the title of the article—although interestingly NOT their URL!

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20200804185057/https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-nuke-just-go-beirut-terrifying-mystery-blast-shockwave-filmed-over-lebanon

@ChrisPalmerNBA likewise deleted his “That’s atomic” tweets.

Veterans Today, on the other hand, would double down on their Israeli nuke story over the next few days as we will see.

For my part, I was fascinated to see how these “fact-checkers and experts” could have so quickly reached the definitive conclusion that 2,750 “tons” of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the port of Beirut had caused the explosion we saw in these videos from Beirut. But I cannot say I was really shocked because I had previously researched & tweeted a thread on how the TV networks on 9/11 from the very beginning pushed what would become the “official” story of a bin Laden-directed, top-down “collapse” of the Twin Towers due to “flying bombs” (i.e., two fuel-filled jetliners), a story that by the end of the day was already the “official” (albeit equally highly problematic) explanation of what happened on 9/11.

But whereas it would take 12 years before I woke to the “official” lies of what happened on 9/11, on 4 August 2020 from the very start I was highly attuned to the way #MSM could so brazenly persuade you to see whatever they wanted you to see even while it was staring you right in the face.

I was hopeful that at least some of the “alternative social media” personalities who followed me would also question the “official” lies of August 4th. I mean hadn’t these alternative opinion leaders regularly attacked the “fact checkers” for practically ANYTHING the “fact checkers” said, uniformly & regularly condemning the “fact checkers” as spreaders of #MSM propaganda. I would have thought the fact that the “fact checkers” had come to such a unanimous and quick consensus on something that was as complicated as what happened on August 4th would, if anything, be an alarm bell to automatically suspect that the fix was on.

Thus when no one in alternative media had seriously questioned the Beirut explosion in the first 24 hours, I decided to call them out to prove they were ACTUALLY “alternative” by simply questioning whatever MSM was reporting about the Beirut explosion.  At this point I myself would have had to admit that I did not have enough evidence to “prove” that Beirut was nuked. But I wanted these alternative media personalities to #QuestionEverything and perhaps, in the process, bring to light the evidence that we could all use to decide for ourselves what had caused the explosion. If they didn’t #QuestionEverything, then I would just have to conclude that they were part of what I was going to start calling the “so-called alternative media” with the hashtag #SCAM.

 

On August 5th, Veterans Today, following up their August 4th tweet, came out with an article titled “Israel Hits Beirut with Nuclear Missile, Trump and Lebanese Govt. Confirm (continually updating).” https://web.archive.org/web/20200805115410/www.veteranstoday.com/2020/08/05/breaking-israel-nukes-beirut/

Since VT was the only alternative media outlet still raising the nuclear issue, I decided to summarize their article in a six-tweet thread, leading with this tweet:

The thread highlighted what I saw as the main points of the article: the claim that this circled image in the photo was the “unique image” of an “Israeli Delilah missile”; “the radiation signature” of “a nuclear fission event in the Eastern Mediterranean” “received from a source in Italy, submitted to VT by the International Atomic Energy Agency (UN)”; Netanyahu’s August 4 statement interpreted as Israel taking credit for dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on the port of Beirut in order “to collapse the current political regime there and revolt against Hezbollah”; “influential and credible sources from Beirut” reporting Beirut explosion about 5.4 kilotons TNT equivalent or 100x energy of 2015 Tianjin explosion using linear extrapolation from Tianjin, which involved 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate; and “Jeff Smith of IAEA confirms this is a nuclear explosion”.

What was the most astonishing thing about this thread was that my Notifications box was almost immediately inundated with a tirade of lambasting, monotonously repetitive (e.g., “It’s a bird!”) replies along with some ad hominem attacks aimed at me personally from tweeters who did not follow me. This was obviously an orchestrated troll attack. I was astonished because in my three years (as of August 2020) of posting on Twitter what I would call rather controversial tweets on nuclear terrorism, criticism of Israel, etc., I had never really had had a problem with trolls. 

So what was it about this particular Twitter thread that set off this troll attack? Was it because I had dared to tweet a summary of a controversial Veterans Today article that accused Israel of nuking a neighboring country? Well there must have been more to it than that because my most popular Twitter thread (in terms of the number of likes & retweets) up to that point had actually been a January 2019 summary of a Veterans Today article arguing similarly, based primarily on the “authority” of the mysterious former IAEA inspector Jeff Smith, that the 2015 explosion in Yemen was caused by an Israeli neutron bomb. But, in stark contrast to the 2020 Beirut thread, the replies & quote tweets to the 2015 Yemen thread were overwhelmingly positive with no troll activity.

I should add that in my three years on Twitter I had rarely tweeted or retweeted anything from Veterans Today and I didn’t tweet the 2015 Yemen or 2020 Beirut threads because I thought Veterans Today was a trusted source.  I had long ago concluded that EVERYTHING that Veterans Today put out was DISINFORMATION, even if there was occasionally some sliver of truth buried in the disinformation. But since NO ONE else on social media was even talking about the possible nuking of Beirut on August 4th, I decided that I should just put the Veterans Today thread out there to perhaps stir up some debate as I had often done with summaries of other articles that I thought were interesting even if I did not necessarily agree with what was said in the article.

One major difference between the two threads was the 2015 Yemen explosion was ancient history by the time I tweeted about it in January 2019 whereas the 2020 Beirut explosion had happened just the day before and whoever was behind the troll attack wanted to CEASE any discussion of the possible nuking of Beirut that managed to slip past the “fact checker” censorship. Since the obvious suspect in any discussion of a nuclear explosion going off in the Middle East is going to be Israel, I concluded there was likely an Israeli/Zionist agenda behind the “Ziotroll attack.”

Looking back I also suspected that the Veterans Today article, far from trying to ferret out what really happened in Beirut, was actually a disinformation set up for the Ziotrolls to attack anyone who might think that VT might be onto something with their accusations against Israel. VT almost made it too easy to completely refute much of the “evidence” they rather bombastically put forward in the days following the Beirut blast. My first inkling of this was all of the tremendous number of early replies saying simply “It’s a bird!” referring to the circled image in the photo that VT said was an “Israeli Delilah missile”. Personally I couldn’t tell what it was but I couldn’t see how trollers saying so repetitively “It’s a bird!” with no further evidence would convince anybody. But later somebody (who was actually a follower of mine) replied with a slow downed video, sure enough the object Veterans Today so adamantly said was an Israeli Delilah missile did indeed look like a bird! I don’t think VT ever admitted that the image was a bird but they quickly dropped the circled image only to move on to other images & claims for Israeli nukes that were also easily debunked. All I could conclude was it was all VT disinformation, an effort to “poison the well” for anybody interested in exploring the possible nuking of Beirut.

 

https://twitter.com/Engel42167942/status/1291068166475583488

 

As for whether it was advisable to tweet my Veterans Today summary, looking back I cannot say it was a bad thing. It did confirm to me that I was onto something in thinking that Beirut was nuked and that Israel had something to do with it otherwise the Ziotrolls would not have come out in such force to attack me for the very first time and Veterans Today would not so blatantly attempted to “poison the well” for anybody thinking there might actually be something to the Israeli nuke story. And the positive 295 tweets & 346 likes from people who in general followed me & I followed—in contrast to the overwhelmingly negative 216 quote tweets & 317 replies from people who neither followed me nor I followed and who seemed to only talk to themselves—suggested there was interest in pursuing the nuclear angle.

What I needed was solid evidence. And then it suddenly appeared. Something much more solid than any mushroom cloud, blinding flash, or even radioactive fallout for proving that an explosion had to have been nuclear.

THE CRATER!

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