4 ms·
- if you "see" the flash, thats the last thing youre ever going to see. will blind you. - thermal radiation is, in fact, light, which travels at the speed of l
by wayn3 9y ago
- if you "see" the flash, thats the last thing youre ever going to see. will blind you.
- thermal radiation is, in fact, light, which travels at the speed of light - but you should not imagine the entirety of the thermal energy to be released by a nuclear weapon to be released instantaneously in a radially travelling sphere. that being said, youre not going to outrun such an explosion. where you are at the time of detonation pretty much determines your odds of survival.
- daxfohl 9y agoTrying to figure out the most rational thing to do at each distance. In fireball, say goodbye. Sounds like shock wave isn't that big of a deal on its own far beyond the fireball region, beyond eardrums, but obviously shrapnel and collapses will get you indirectly. But thermal radiation seems to extend much farther per the website and there's no escape. So is that what actually kills the most people? (Though it's 2017, who ever goes outside anymore?) And then of course fallout, but I guess you can flee or shelter from that.
- mikeash 9y agoThe thermal pulse lasts several seconds for a large bomb. If you can immediately throw yourself into a ditch or behind a wall or otherwise shelter from it, you may greatly reduce the burns you receive. What kills the most people depends on the size of the bomb. For really small ones (like the US Army's nuclear bazooka from the 50s) the prompt radiation has the greatest lethal radius. For medium sized ones like Hiroshima, blast is the major one. For really big ones, thermal effects reach the farthest.
- daxfohl 9y agoIn the latter, do you mean thermal radiation or thermal conduction? I guess it doesn't make a huge difference because radiation hits you before you cam do anything about it, and conduction is impossible to get away from. But curious anyway.
- mikeash 9y agoRadiation. I assume you men conduction through the air? That's basically what the fireball is, and it covers a much smaller area.
- cocoablazing 9y agoThe shock wave is a serious hazard to personnel far beyond the fireball. Just a few pounds of dynamic overpressure presents a hurricane-force wind hazard, and five will result in catastrophic damage to non-hardened structures and a near complete loss of life. The shock front detaches quite early from the fireball. The classic scary videos of residential structures annihilated during nuclear testing were sampled from beyond the maximum fireball radii.
- daxfohl 9y agoYeah those videos make me wonder. But my understanding from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions is that humans are quite a bit more resilient than structures. So a shock wave that utterly destroys an otherwise strong structure may not kill a human. However that seems related purely to the atmospheric shock wave itself. I guess shrapnel (even dirt), building collapse, maybe even "throwing the person" (so the ground, rather than atmospheric effects, kills) would greatly add to the indirect ways of dying. But is it most likely thermal radiation that actually does you in?
- cocoablazing 9y agoThe thermal radiation and resulting firestorm would be the cause of most deaths from an attack on a city.
- hrehhf 9y ago> - if you "see" the flash, thats the last thing youre ever going to see. will blind you. Maybe not. Richard Feynman claimed to have watched a nuclear explosion with nothing but regular glass between him and the blast. He assumed the glass would block any ultraviolet light and he was not blinded. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.h...
- wayn3 9y agoglass does block ultraviolet light, which makes it effective protection.