I recently saw a comment chain about nuclear bombs, and that led me to thinking about this. Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city. I survive relatively fine, but obviously the main part of the city has been destroyed, while major zones extending from the center were also badly damaged. What would be a good response to (a) survive and (b) help out the recovery effort?

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    That map doesn’t look like it touch on the fallout at all, just the damage from the explosion.

    Depending on how efficient the bomb is, and the direction of the winds, highly radioactive unspent fissile material will travel for miles. This stuff will shave decades off your life.

    • volvoxvsmarla @lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I checked the website out yesterday. You can either have the fallout shown or not. It also depends on whether you choose to detonate in the air or on the surface. But if you choose the option with the fallout, boy,… honestly maybe don’t because it was legit more depressing and scary than what you see in the screenshot above.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        This is one of the fascinating things I learned about all the nuclear testing the USA was doing in the 70s 80s and 90s. They weren’t trying to make bigger bombs (that was 50s and 60s) it was making the same nuclear material in the bomb more completely used. The more of the material use, the less fallout.

        For reference, the Hiroshima bomb used less than 2% of its fuel. Of its 64kg of uranium, only about 1kg actually split. The rest of the highly radioactive Uranium was just spread around by the explosion as fallout.