Making Nuclear Weapons Easier to Use? Macro Photos of Crystals

Sulphur recrystallised viewed using crossed polarisation filters, showing Newton's rings

According to the Guardian, the Trump administration intends to loosen the constraints on lowe yield nuclear weapons and propose the introduction of two new types (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/us-to-loosen-nuclear-weapons-policy-and-develop-more-usable-warheads). One would be cruise missile submarine-launched. The information comes from an expert who has seen drafts of the nuclear posture review (NPR), which could be published after the President's State of the Union Address at the end of January.

The additional concern is that the use of nuclear weapons by the US may be made easier by allowing use where there is a major non-nuclear attack with mass casualties. On the other hand, the policy could be seen as a reaction to increased nuclear activity in apparent violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

Chatted to Ulli to seek his advice on macro photography. Apparently lens reversal is certainly worth a try. In the meantime, I made a temporary bodge fitting of a 3.7x microscope objective as a camera lens to card and blue-tacked it to my extension tubes. Then repeated yesterday's photography of crystal or filter slides using crossed polarisation filters. With roughly the same field of view (about 10mm)  the resultant photo stacks gave much better images, without the softening seen at the edge of the field of view. More results can be seen in the album here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/4d24Pbqnsldre0zc2