Yawn.
Been through all this before, in the 80's. Scary old nuke war was used as a control mechanism then, too. Back then it was leftist/ Communist agents planted here to ramp up the fear and convince us silly Yanks that nuclear war was unsurvivable. To that end, they manipulated the data to make scary pictures, which well meaning masses dutifully grabbed up and ran with, force-multiplying the agents' work considerably. They did things like showing a "blast radius" from a dinky nuke, and one from a bigger nuke that was dramatically larger. They neglected to tell us the one from the dinky nuke was the 65 PSI radius (which extends for only a very short radius from the blast center), which can suck the lungs right out of your body, whereas the bigger one was at a far, far weaker 0.5 PSI for the big weapon, which might break half of the windows in a neighborhood and leave everything else intact, including the inhabitants.
They also tried to scare us by pointing out the "destructive effects" of bombs that didn't even exist, and leading us to believe that the enemy had nothing but those giant, but non-existent bombs. For example, the Russians tested the "Tsar Bomba", which they claimed was 100 MT. Actual measurements put it at only around 57 MT... but the agents gleefully informed us of the damage from a 100 MT bomb that "the Russians have", and implied that was ALL they had... when in reality only one was ever built, and it was expended in a test, which was so disappointing that another was never built.
Here's the facts, from actual physics.
The destructive radius of a given bomb goes up as the cube root of the yield, not in a linear manner. That's because the force expands in all directions, in 3D, not just one direction in the flat plane of a paper picture. In that case it would increase as the square root of the yield, because the area of a circle increases as 1/ pi* r^2 (only 2 dimensions), and the volume of an expanding sphere (i.e. real nuclear blast) is 1/pi*r^3 (because it expands in 3 dimensions). Now, that's a lot of numbers, so to visualize it gut-wise, let's use the example of the 15 KT bomb vs. the 15,000 kt bomb (= 15 MT). 15,000 divided by 15 is a factor of 1000. You'd think it would reach 1000 times farther, right? Scary, huh?
But wait - the cube root of 1000 is just 10, not 1000 . the cube root of 1000>> 10*10*10 = 1000. So a given overpressure, let's use that scary 0.5 PSI that breaks windows, just so we can maximize the scary circle, would increase by 10, not 1000. If the Hiroshima bomb would break windows a mile away, the big bad bomb would break them 10 miles away, not nation-wide. Using the square root of the yield for a flat circle would extend the radius to 100 mile, 10*10, but it would also defy the laws of physics.
Oh, there's more. Because of the limiting effect of the cube root law, bigger bombs deliver less bang for their buck, and are not cost effective, so there aren't many of them left. They are just not militarily efficient. The vast majority of any nuclear arsenal, whether American or Russian, is composed of relatively bitty bombs. Most are "tactical nukes" AKA "battlefield nukes", with damage radii measured in yards. You don't want to toss nuclear artillery shells at an engaged enemy when you'll be vaporizing your own as well - that kinda defeats the purpose.
Of the strategic nukes, the bigger ones were dismantled first in favor of retaining the smaller, more efficient and cost effective ones. that's why most of our nuclear force is 100 kt or less.
But what about fallout? Death raining from above right down on you like dust. That's some scary shit, ain't it? Well, even producing any fallout at all is a trade off. Nuclear bombs have what is called an "optimal burst height". It has to be so far above the ground to achieve maximum damage radius that no fallout is produced at all, since the fireball has to actually contact the ground to vaporize a part of it, which is then sucked up into the fireball and irradiated. In simple terms, you can have fallout, or you can have a big damage radius, but you can't have both. You have to make a choice which one you want. In a "ground burst", where fallout is produced, the damage radius is smaller to begin with, and is made smaller still by obstructions like buildings and mountains absorbing all the energy of the blast wave front. It wears it down quicker, before it can reach even the max for a ground burst.
Optimal burst heights are computed for the desired blast damage radius - if it's too far up, that pressure never even reaches the ground.
The radiation in any fallout particles produced is another thing. it obeys the laws of 7, which are a function of "half life". For a sevenfold passage of time, the radiation is reduced by half. for another sevenfold passage, that half is halved, to 1/4 initial strength, and for another 7 fold passage of time, that quarter is halved to 1/8, and so on. In simple terms, what fallout may come rapidly loses it's punch.
Weather factors into fallout patterns as well. Faster wind spreads it farther, but since the same initial amount has to cover more area, it deposits it more weakly, because it's spread out more thinly. Rain washed it out of the air, creating "hot spots" where more is deposited, leaving less for the rest of the area it covers, making it even weaker there.
Don't get me wrong - nuclear war is a bad, bad, very bad thing. It's just not as bad as the scaremongers want you to believe for their own political ends, and is certainly not "unsurvivable".
.
Been through all this before, in the 80's. Scary old nuke war was used as a control mechanism then, too. Back then it was leftist/ Communist agents planted here to ramp up the fear and convince us silly Yanks that nuclear war was unsurvivable. To that end, they manipulated the data to make scary pictures, which well meaning masses dutifully grabbed up and ran with, force-multiplying the agents' work considerably. They did things like showing a "blast radius" from a dinky nuke, and one from a bigger nuke that was dramatically larger. They neglected to tell us the one from the dinky nuke was the 65 PSI radius (which extends for only a very short radius from the blast center), which can suck the lungs right out of your body, whereas the bigger one was at a far, far weaker 0.5 PSI for the big weapon, which might break half of the windows in a neighborhood and leave everything else intact, including the inhabitants.
They also tried to scare us by pointing out the "destructive effects" of bombs that didn't even exist, and leading us to believe that the enemy had nothing but those giant, but non-existent bombs. For example, the Russians tested the "Tsar Bomba", which they claimed was 100 MT. Actual measurements put it at only around 57 MT... but the agents gleefully informed us of the damage from a 100 MT bomb that "the Russians have", and implied that was ALL they had... when in reality only one was ever built, and it was expended in a test, which was so disappointing that another was never built.
Here's the facts, from actual physics.
The destructive radius of a given bomb goes up as the cube root of the yield, not in a linear manner. That's because the force expands in all directions, in 3D, not just one direction in the flat plane of a paper picture. In that case it would increase as the square root of the yield, because the area of a circle increases as 1/ pi* r^2 (only 2 dimensions), and the volume of an expanding sphere (i.e. real nuclear blast) is 1/pi*r^3 (because it expands in 3 dimensions). Now, that's a lot of numbers, so to visualize it gut-wise, let's use the example of the 15 KT bomb vs. the 15,000 kt bomb (= 15 MT). 15,000 divided by 15 is a factor of 1000. You'd think it would reach 1000 times farther, right? Scary, huh?
But wait - the cube root of 1000 is just 10, not 1000 . the cube root of 1000>> 10*10*10 = 1000. So a given overpressure, let's use that scary 0.5 PSI that breaks windows, just so we can maximize the scary circle, would increase by 10, not 1000. If the Hiroshima bomb would break windows a mile away, the big bad bomb would break them 10 miles away, not nation-wide. Using the square root of the yield for a flat circle would extend the radius to 100 mile, 10*10, but it would also defy the laws of physics.
Oh, there's more. Because of the limiting effect of the cube root law, bigger bombs deliver less bang for their buck, and are not cost effective, so there aren't many of them left. They are just not militarily efficient. The vast majority of any nuclear arsenal, whether American or Russian, is composed of relatively bitty bombs. Most are "tactical nukes" AKA "battlefield nukes", with damage radii measured in yards. You don't want to toss nuclear artillery shells at an engaged enemy when you'll be vaporizing your own as well - that kinda defeats the purpose.
Of the strategic nukes, the bigger ones were dismantled first in favor of retaining the smaller, more efficient and cost effective ones. that's why most of our nuclear force is 100 kt or less.
But what about fallout? Death raining from above right down on you like dust. That's some scary shit, ain't it? Well, even producing any fallout at all is a trade off. Nuclear bombs have what is called an "optimal burst height". It has to be so far above the ground to achieve maximum damage radius that no fallout is produced at all, since the fireball has to actually contact the ground to vaporize a part of it, which is then sucked up into the fireball and irradiated. In simple terms, you can have fallout, or you can have a big damage radius, but you can't have both. You have to make a choice which one you want. In a "ground burst", where fallout is produced, the damage radius is smaller to begin with, and is made smaller still by obstructions like buildings and mountains absorbing all the energy of the blast wave front. It wears it down quicker, before it can reach even the max for a ground burst.
Optimal burst heights are computed for the desired blast damage radius - if it's too far up, that pressure never even reaches the ground.
The radiation in any fallout particles produced is another thing. it obeys the laws of 7, which are a function of "half life". For a sevenfold passage of time, the radiation is reduced by half. for another sevenfold passage, that half is halved, to 1/4 initial strength, and for another 7 fold passage of time, that quarter is halved to 1/8, and so on. In simple terms, what fallout may come rapidly loses it's punch.
Weather factors into fallout patterns as well. Faster wind spreads it farther, but since the same initial amount has to cover more area, it deposits it more weakly, because it's spread out more thinly. Rain washed it out of the air, creating "hot spots" where more is deposited, leaving less for the rest of the area it covers, making it even weaker there.
Don't get me wrong - nuclear war is a bad, bad, very bad thing. It's just not as bad as the scaremongers want you to believe for their own political ends, and is certainly not "unsurvivable".
.
Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’