Nuclear Blast Radius of your City ! -Must see

Nasa supposed to nuke the moon tomorrow, does anyone have a moon chart, that sure would be interresting to look at. See how much is going to get vaporized.

There aren't any 50 MT bombs. The Tsara Bomba was a one-off deal, and was so powerful that the 50 MT is an estimate. Others place it at 60 MT, or some say even bigger.

As near as I recall, 3 MT just about tops the list in current inventory. Might be a few (very few) in the 9-10 MT range.

I remember in the nuke scare of the 80's, folks were coming around trying to propagandize college students with "what if.." scenarios involving huge bombs that didn't even exist. They conveniently failed to provide THAT bit of information, and then proceeded to exaggerate the effects on top of that, attempting to scare the students into seeing things their way. I gotta admit, it scared me too, until I actually got into the literature, and found out the facts. It was still a spooky proposition, but not nearly as fatal as they told folks. Eminently survivable, if one had the foresight not to be at ground zero of a bursting bomb.

My absolute favorite was the gal who started yelping about what would happen if a "100 Megaton bomb" (referring to the above-mentioned Tsara Bomba) were dropped on the local Raytheon factory. She never mentioned that such a bomb did not exist, nor did she provide any sort of rationalization as to why a huge bomb like that would be targeted to take out one measly little factory. Then she exaggerated the damage radii. She had to leave the campus in disgrace when I called her on it, and proceeded to provide the relevant data, including the formulae to arrive at it.

Blast damage radii varies as the cube root of the yield ( W^[1/3], for those that care) and is affected by above ground burst height. To attempt to simplify, a ground burst is required for appreciable fallout (the fallout material has to come from somewhere), but that in turn minimizes the damage radius from blast effects. An optimized burst height for blast effects is too high above ground for fallout. It's a trade off, and depends on the havoc one wants to wreak.

The "cube root" part is just a fancy way of saying that a 27 MT bomb would do only 3 times the damage of a 1 MT bomb, not 27 times (27^[1/3}=3), except there are no 27 MT bombs. That's why. With increasing yield, you get less "bang for the buck", and so smaller bombs are more cost-effective. that's why the vast bulk of the intercontinental arsenals was in the 300 KT to 1 MT range, with very few of the larger 3-10 MT bombs, and those for special application against "harder" targets.

Guess it wont matter where you live when an asteroid hits

Back in the late '80s before peace broke out, I had a government fallout map on my cube wall.

Fallout will make you wish you were with the blast.

I'm thinking terrorists will only be able to carry kiloton-sized weapons. Not as much physical damage as a missile delivered nuke, but the damage to civil liberties and the increased centralization of a massive government means the terrorists would have taken the last of our liberty, the thing they (and this administration) hate.

[edit on 22-6-2009 by Dbriefed]

here're a couple of links that i think EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE!!!

www.webpal.org...

www.geocities.com...

...you can even click on each state and get an idea of the fallout vicinity, even taking into account the country's wind directions!

reply to post by Eye of Horus

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They ARE NOT NUKING THE MOON, they are using a kinetic energy warhead to shoot at the Moon.

Not sure how much help it would be to terrorists, knowing how much they could destroy "if only" they could just get their hands on a nuke. Even most governments have a hard time making the first few work right. A "dirty bomb" is a far more likely candidate for terrorist operations, and blast radius in those is severely limited, because the actual explosion is produced by conventional means, and most likely wouldn't get the radioactive particles high enough for any sort of wide-spread fallout.



Absolutely correct. Burst height, wind patterns, wind speed, pressure systems, local rainfall, and intervening terrain AT THE TIME OF THE EXPLOSION, all factor into the fallout intensity and deposit pattern. Most models, such as these, use an "idealized" wind , accounting mostly for the general prevailing winds, not specific local daily winds and weather (which would be impossible to factor in at any other time than the actual explosion).

Faster winds tend to produce a larger pattern, but with less radiation per square inch, because the total amount is spread out over more area, and kept aloft longer, where the half-life factor reduces the radioactivity of the particles steadily.

The further one is from ground zero, the longer it takes the fallout to get there, hence the more time radioactive decay has to work it's magic.

Slow winds deposit higher intensity radiation, but MUCH closer to ground zero.

Cells of rain that the fallout is blown through tends to create localized hot spots of more intense radiation, at the expense of washing radioactive particles out of the sky, so they can't be deposited downwind.

The pretty lozenge-shaped fallout patterns of all the examples have never been observed in any actual tests. The fallout patterns in actual tests looked more like Rorshach tests.

Mountains tend to intensify the blast pressure (reflection) on the explosion side of the mountain, and weaken it (dispersion) on the away-from-the-blast side.

reply to post by SharkBait

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The mapplet linked in the OP only shows the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion. However there are other effects that must be taken into account. The energy of a nuclear explosion is transferred to the surrounding medium in four distinct forms:

> Blast.

> Thermal radiation.

> Nuclear radiation.

> Flash. (Causing retinal burns if looked at directly).

The distribution of energy among the first three forms mentioned above, will depend on the yield of the weapon, the location of the burst, and the characteristics of the environment. For a low altitude atmospheric detonation of nominal yield, the energy is distributed roughly as follows:

> 50% as blast.

> 35% as thermal radiation; made up of a wide range in the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light and some soft x-ray emitted at the time of the explosion.

> 15% as nuclear radiation (including 5% as initial ionizing radiation consisting chiefly of neutrons and gamma rays emitted within the first minute after detonation, and 10% as residual nuclear radiation or fallout.

So the sim shown in the OPs link is only a small part of the overall effects of a nuclear blast.

Then there is the effect of the Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry all unshielded electronics knocking out all radio, TV, computer systems, GPS, cars, aircraft, electric power systems, etc. The higher the explosion, the broader the funnel.

However, the intensity of these fields decreases in proportion to the circumference and distance from the explosion. The actual amount of EMP energy deposited per unit area falls off as the inverse-square of distance.


Illustration: atomicarchive

So, there are a lot of other effects that have to be taken into consideration to calculate the actual damage caused by a nuke. This is known as the atomic damage template (ADT) available in all Army units.

Cheers!

In round figures, "0". Doesn't get much rounder than that. They built and tested ONE, and it was so expensive and unpredictable, and just plain scary, that they never built another. They couldn't even pin down just exactly how powerful it was, had to estimate the explosive force, and so determined it was useless on top of everything else.

You ought to see the video of the explosion, though!

reply to post by Eye of Horus

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Dude, what are you toking? Stop it man!

I think the asteroid impact info on the simulator is going off the asteroid that created the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico 65 million years ago. And not to mean being a smart ass but has any heard of the American Hiroshima plan as far as terrorists getting nukes go?

Of course, the first city I entered was Tehran.

Creepy stuff, I've always been curious about events like that. Kinda creepy all at the same time.

Very interesting; I think it's safe to say that an asteroid impact will wipe out just about everyone in the US and Canada x3. Guess we should all hide on Island or something just in case.

And for your enjoyment here it is .

YouTube Link

And how they did it .

YouTube Link

[edit on 23-6-2009 by tarifa37]

Damn, I deployed a NK nuke on the dead centre of Perth here, and the radius was well away from me... and I dont like the city anyway!

But then the fallout, Right in my path, and then some...

What an insidious and horrible weapon the nuke is...

reply to post by SharkBait

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I checked this out and im pretty surprised.

I was always under the impression that nukes covered far more ground.

Looks like id be fine from initial blasts from any city near me unless it was an asteroid, then id be toast.

Its the fallout thats the worst part anyways is it not?

except about 30 minutes after the dust settles, you'll wish you were inside the blast zone for a quick death. fallout covers a MASSIVE area.

from the looks of the map, it is severely underestimating the destructive power of a nuke or its only the "everything in here got vaporized by the fireball" radius and not the shock wave.

not to mention, yes, fallout is by far the worst part and it covers a huge area. look at the puny little circle the tsar bomba (50MT) draws on the map, then bear in mind it could cause third degree burns at 100km and caused damage 1000km away (the tsar bomba shattered windows in finland).

the fireball *alone* was 8km wide, and the resulting mushroom cloud was 64km tall and 40km wide. now factor in high-altitude winds and that fallout plume is covering a *massive* area. you wouldn't want to be on the *coast* one went off on.