Actually, when you look at articles where experts discuss the results of such bombing simulations, they look positively pathetic compared to our fears of them.
I once saw an article put it like this : if 10 terrorists get loose on the streets of any major city and get to shoot unopposed for 30 minutes, the death toll will be greater than that of an atomic bomb. 100 meter distance from an atomic bomb 100kT blast, behind a normal glass window, you should be safe. Even at 50 meters there's more than 50% chance for survival, unless directly exposed to the blast.
Atomic bombs have zero power to end the world, nor do they have the power to make more than a few buildings collapse. They will, however, ignite lots of fires, which will prove fatal to paper houses, which go up in firestorms in minutes. Those houses, of course, don't really exist anywhere outside of Japan ...
Actually, when you look at articles where experts discuss the results of such bombing simulations, they look positively pathetic compared to our fears of them.
I once saw an article put it like this : if 10 terrorists get loose on the streets of any major city and get to shoot unopposed for 30 minutes, the death toll will be greater than that of an atomic bomb. 100 meter distance from an atomic bomb 100kT blast, behind a normal glass window, you should be safe. Even at 50 meters there's more than 50% chance for survival, unless directly exposed to the blast.
Atomic bombs have zero power to end the world, nor do they have the power to make more than a few buildings collapse. They will, however, ignite lots of fires, which will prove fatal to paper houses, which go up in firestorms in minutes. Those houses, of course, don't really exist anywhere outside of Japan ...
I think for this to happen, there would need to be demonstrations of the safety aspects of using nuclear weapons.
Can you imagine trying to justify this project to the public? It would be a nightmare: "Nuclear explosions planned outside Los Angeles"... it would likely trigger a mini-freakout.
You should expect just the opposite. It’s totally plausible could make nuclear reactions fail safe if you do it right, and I think they’ve figured that out (supposedly). But there’s no way you can force thousands of different people to get up on a roof safely.
Agreed. There is also a chance of a fizzle (tiny fission reaction - in the hundreds of tons at most - with negligible energy output), but it’s not going to have much of a different outcome frankly.
Compared to a 100 kiloton to 5 megaton explosion, it’s nothing.
Think about it - how many cities have been destroyed by modern nuclear weapons from which they could draw conclusions?
Even the results of a simulation of such an event is highly speculative... what happens after the bomb depends greatly on the assumptions you make about damage to structures, weather patterns, the size of the bomb used, the altitude at which it is detonated, and a host of other variables.
The bottom line is that all we know for certain is that such an event would be horrific... but we don't know exactly how.
I'm no expert, but at a guess I'd worry about radioactive material getting out of the containment and being blown to where it shouldn't. Which is really the problem most of the time, rather than something blowing up or irradiating something directly.
I'd imagine this is approximately what Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have looked like, but the direction of the pressure wave would be different as they were both air bursts.
I don't think it's pushing a narrative. I think it's just sloppy thinking/describing.
A nuclear detonation presents multiple risks/dangers, on multiple time scales. One of the longer term dangers is the dispersion of radioactive material over a large area, resulting in that area becoming uninhabitable. That is what the author is describing. They're not trying to scare you into thinking the material is going to explode
This is awesome. It alleviates one of the greatest fears of nuclear strikes, aside from the destruction.
I know there have been several discussions floating around about dirty bombs and nukes that could be used in terrorist attacks, and it has seemed to me that what most people are afraid of is not the bomb itself, but the fallout. This could be a huge relief for those fears.
reply