I came across an interesting book the other day, The Effects of Nuclear
Weapons. I wasn’t really looking for it, I just sort of found it.
It’s a fascinating book, a compilation of all the research done by the U.S. Energy and Defense departments on what happens after you say “nuke.”
The effect of a nuclear bomb depends on several factors: yield of the bomb in kilotons or megatons of TNT, altitude, and the distance you happen to be from ground zero when it goes off. Minor factors are the terrain, the weather and just plain luck.
The average size of a nuclear bomb in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is 1 million tons of TNT or 1 megaton. When one of those nuclear bombs explodes, all the nuclear material, the bomb casing, and a good deal of the surrounding air turn into a fireball tens of millions of degrees hot. The heated gases expand, producing destructive waves of air pressure. Houses, for example, would simply implode under this pressure, to say nothing of what happens to its occupants.
A 1-megaton explosion at least 2,850 feet above the Earth would have a fireball more than a mile in diameter, which would appear to someone 50 miles away to be many more times more brilliant than the sun at noon.
Heat from a nuclear explosion can cause clothing to burst into flames, the upholstery in cars and buildings to ignite, and severe burns to human flesh. Several Nagasaki and Hiroshima victims had peculiar patterns burned into their flesh, because of the dark areas on the clothes they were wearing at the time of the blast. Buildings are also susceptible to damage from the intense heat. Wooden buildings, for instance, can burst into flame, though they sometimes extinguish themselves a fraction of a second afterwards.
The most fascinating section in the book though, was chapter 12—“Biological Effects.” What do all these interesting bombs do to humans? The answer—not very nice things.
The population at Hiroshima withing 3.1 miles of the blast was 256,300 people. We killed 68,000 of them, and injured 76,000. At Nagasaki, there were 173,800 people within 3.1 miles: we killed 38,000 and injured 21,000. That means on the average we killed 24.65 percent of the population within 3.1 miles, and injured 22.55 percent.
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons discusses the difficulty of determining exactly what killed the people in Japan—whether it was the blast, the heat, falling rubble, flying debris or the radiation that got them.
To see what would happen, the U.S. government set up several dummies and exposed them to nuclear blasts. One dummy, within 9 feet of travel and 0.5 second of time, achieved a speed of about 21 feet per second—or 14.5 miles per hour.
The government also “dropped animal cadavers onto hard, flat surfaces from vehicles traveling between 10 and 60 miles per hour in order to study what types of displacement they would undergo.” The study found that “stopping distance increased with mass, and that the consistency in the stopping times of the objects was because the animals assumed a rolling position about their long axis, regardless of the initial orientation. The animals remained relatively low to the ground and bounced very little.”
In addition, the government also studied how fast debris had to be flying through the air before being able to penetrate skin, and how fast a person can go before the act of slamming into a wall or other hard object would cause permanent injury—like fractured skulls.
The effects of radiation exposure vary from a little light nausea to almost instant death, depending on the dose received.
Everything is not entirely bleak, however. The good news, according to the book, is that although it was very common for hair to fall out of the victims in Japan a couple weeks after the blast, it always grew back within a few months, providing the victims survived. So take heart! As long as you don’t die, your hair will grow back.
So let’s put all this marvelous information together. I’ll just whip out my Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer, thoughtfully provided by the government, and figure out what kind of damage we in peaceful College Park would undergo if a 1-megaton nuclear bomb exploded in the capital. I just dial in a 1-megaton yield, seven miles from the blast, assume an air burst for the maximum radiation exposure, and we get the following—maximum wind speed of 80 miles per hour and people caught in the open would suffer third degree burns from the thermal radiation emitted by the explosion. The good news? We are far enough away from the capital to not have any radiation exposure directly, though we will be susceptible to fallout, and because this calculation is for an air burst, there would be no crater caused by the bomb directly. Of course, the blast would insure that there would be no buildings standing for about five miles around ground zero.
Of course, these figures are for College Park. If you were actually in the capital, your chances of survival would be small—very small indeed.
Also, of course, this assumes that only one bomb is dropped, and that only the capital is targeted. Fat chance. With the Naval Surface Weapons Center in White Oak, the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, and all the other covert operations right nearby, the chances of beautiful downtown College park not having a nuke landing in its backyard seems pretty small.
Isn’t technology wonderful? We have created the most awesome method of self-destruction known to current science. The power to achieve our own Armageddon, our own world-wide self-genocide, is within our grasp. I have heard people across the country espousing the dangers of nuclear power plants, and I just have to shake my head. All that can happen with a nuclear plant is the China Syndrome—a meltdown of the reactor core causing the release of radiation and radioactive materials over an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania. Admittedly, that is also a serious potential problem. But realize that we killed 24.65 percent of the population in two Japanese cities—and realize that those bombs were about 12.5 kilotons. We now have bombs up to 20 megatons.
The latest reports from the Reagan administration have suggested, for the first time, that the United States might be able to survive a nuclear war. I suggest that if you hear a nuclear strike is on the way, get in your car, and drive as quickly as you can to the area most likely to be ground zero. I’ll meet you there.
Andrew Coile is a junior radio, television, and film major.
First published in the Diamondback, the daily student newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park, on November 10, 1982.
I walked into my History class at Maryland, and the teaching assistant asked me, “Are you the same Andrew Coile whose article appeared in the Diamondback today?”
I responded, “Today?” because the column was supposed to run that Friday, not Wednesday. Since I worked in the Production Shop, I liked to be on hand when my columns were being run, so I could make sure there were no last-minute problems in what was actually going to print. Note that editors weren’t thrilled about this, but they had no control over the Production Shop, and I was one of the very few people that worked in both the Production Shop and the newsroom.
There was actually an editing error in what was published, and because I didn’t know the column was going to run, I wasn’t there to double-check it. I have fixed it in what appears above.
Copyright © 1995 by Andrew C. M. Coile, all rights reserved. Please send comments to andrew@coile.com
Return to
Writing page
Return to
Andrew’s Home Page