nukes

Discussion in 'The Future' started by mr.morrison, Feb 19, 2006.

  1. mr.morrison

    mr.morrison Senior Member

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    if a nuke hit a city, how large would be the blast radius?i live like 15 miles outside of DC so i figure its something i should know
     
  2. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    you need to be more specific in your thread title. you could have been talking about power plants or just unenriched uranium ore.

    at any rate to answer your more specific question you still need to be more specific. specificly they come in all sizes. i.e. destructive capabilities. also depends on whether it's an air birst or it hits the ground first.

    15miles of d.c.
    let me put it this way, if one got through that was worth the trouble of getting through, yah the chances are pretty good you'd be toast.

    unless you were in a basement that was below ground level, and the floor above you was strong enough to support whatever odd angles the rest of the building landed on top of it at.

    then you'd either need self contained life support in there and stay put for a couple of weeks, or get the hell out of there, once the dust cleared, minimizing your exposure to it, as quickly as you could, otherwise, radiation sickness cancer city.

    but again a lot depends on the yeald and nature of the device and how it was detonated. it could be small enough to not even effect you directly (unlikely) or large enough that you'd already be someplace you didn't have to worry about little things like mortality (not unlikely at all, though not inevitable either)

    =^^=
    .../\...
     
  3. mr.morrison

    mr.morrison Senior Member

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  4. Green

    Green Iconoclastic

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    I'd say it would completely destroy everything within a mile radius, and then everybody would die or be mutated depending on which way the wind blows the radiation. It could be more or less, depending on the power of the bomb. If your not dead, try not to get radiation poisoning. The radiation will cause your organs to melt and your body to mutate and get cancer.
     
  5. Occam

    Occam Old bag of dreams

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    Against Cities
    Just about all missle borne warheads are MIRV's riding a 'bus' in low orbit after the missle falls away just outside the atmosphere..[makes all those movies look real dumb eh]
    The bus might carry up to 10 Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicles [mirv's] . The bus /computer pops the mirv's out in a planed patten that has them free fall to their targets. Usually in a 'footprint' [grid pattern on target area.]
    But sometimes a group of footprints or even just one or two on a single target.
    All anti city detonations would be airbursts
    US and Soviet SSBN's carry mirved warheads as well so expect a rain of warheads from them too.
    By the way.. some movies depict nukes as big cones..quite right.
    But they come in blunt end first. the blunt end is an ablating heatshield

    Against HARD targets like NoradCom or missle silos. The bus may have only 1 to 3 warheads. Norad would get a penetrator .
    A lump of ceramsteel that punches a hole/tunnel in the mountain that allows one big MF'r ~2-5mt warhead to follow it in.
    All Anti-bunker/silo dets would be surface subsurface.

    As u want to know about a city bursts effect. Then the warhead would probably be 200 to 500 Kilotons in yeild detonating at about 1000 meters above the whitehouse.
    The fireball would expand in a second to 1500 meters radius and a temperature of 200 million degrees farenheit
    At 15miles [24km] you'd loose your windows and if unlucky the
    place might catch fire.
    But at that distance hard gamma effects woould be small.

    Unfortunately if a mirved missle was fired by an organised enemy at washinton
    they's use a footprint
    * * *
    * * *
    * * *
    above is warhead pattern from above..whitehouse at center.
    each about 5-10 km apart...
    Which to you would mean that if were in the cellar you might make it.
    But dont expect a house to continue to exist above you.
    As a mater of interest..at the height of the cold war..The soviets probably
    slated 6-8 SLBM's and their footprints to washington alone.
    With maybe 1 or 2 big mother 1-3 megaton devices just to be sure

    If memory serves. In the 70's80's the US slated 300 to 400 warheads
    to the greater moscow area and it's bunkers/NAAM"S alone.

    This friendly nuclear lesson bought to you by occam
    who learnt it all years back in a futile attempt to understand
    an insanity implicit in the SAC logo
    'peace is our profession'

    Occam
     
  6. mr.morrison

    mr.morrison Senior Member

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    lol im fucked
     
  7. Occam

    Occam Old bag of dreams

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    As said before... chance of global nuke war now VERY low.

    Maybe the military secretly payed for the movies armagedon and
    deep Impact. 'aint it lucky we made those bombs' thus some justification for the trillions of dollars thrown down the toilet to build all that usless crap.
     
  8. yovo

    yovo Member

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    Exactly, the dynamic is completely different now. Though Russia and the US still have the ability to anhilate eachother (and the rest us with them) thier current arsonals are really just a show of force. Not a force of attrition and anhialation intended for eachother but a barganing chip to ensure supremicy of logistics outside thier borders(supply of oil and other raw resources). The focuss now is to attain tactical supremicy, by developing nukes which could actually be deployed in a combat situation with reduced and manageable fallout(sub-terrainian detonation is one of the ways in which this is acheived), therefore not setting in motion the doomsday scenario in which no one can possibly 'win'. In the very near future, and even in years past these tactical nukes have been touted as a means of achieving a pre-emptive strike to isolate a rogue state like Iran, or deployed in areas of remote terrain where keeping a ground force is not practical but local and adapted enemy forces are known to be in hiding (ie the mountainous regions of Afganistan).

    Further down the road, as resources run thin, and we continue to grow cold and calous to the plight of the third world it becomes very possible that these tactical nukes are deployed as a means of wiping out strategicly situated under-developed populations, labelled as 'acceptable losses', to keep open supply routes (an oil pipeline in Nigeria or say islands of tactical importance for shipping in the pacific, etc). The thinking is rather than occupy an area you simply make it inacessible to the enemy, or unwanted undigenous populations by rendering it barren, and only able to support unmanned and automated defense and supply infustructure.

    There is also the concern of the increasing number of refugees and the potential for mass human migration, and with it disease and uncontrollable chaotic violence. This is most realistic if say the African contenent continues with it's current route of complete societal destabilisation(the congo, Uganda, Rewanda, Somollia, Ethiopia, Sudan, west Africa). Much as the 'barbarians' sacked rome it is entirely possible that these masses could spill into europe or the middle east in a mass exodus. In this case tactical nukes become a force used to keep migratory routes inacessable by placing a gepgraphic roadblocks of fallout in the path of unwanted migration.

    Essentially in the 21st century nukes may very well be the means by which the north both plunders the south and keeps it's volitile and undeveloped population in check when it's no longer possible to do so by means of financial supremicy and expensive, resource rich conventional warfare(ie following the collapse of the American ecomomy when China no longer relies on it's import market, and subsequently it's investment in the US dollar).

    Religious ideology and Race will certainly be manipulated, alliances will certainly be formed but it's no longer a simple matter of nation state warfare, it's resource dependency and corperate supremicy.
     
  9. YankNBurn

    YankNBurn Owner

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    As far as a your question it would deeply depend on the size of the nuke, the placement and geography between you and it, and also the type, wind ect. I mean if it was an ICBM with normal warhead, say immediate 100 radius miles and no shelter is going to pretect you unless it is deep and has its own air system. The old ideas of fall out shelters are kind of a joke. They are great for fall out but the blast and heat wave works as follows. The blast sucks all the air out and the heat wave then gets sucked in (Pressure cooker anyone) then if you live through that fun you get to enjoy the issue of good clean air or lack of, toilet usage, food, water, medical supplies.... and the effects from the blast will last well beyond your lifetime.

    So simply, your toast! If your idea is to attempt to live through a WW3 situation I beg you to understand the movies have to have happy endings, best place to be during a global nuke attack is making love at ground zero! You wont feel a thing and no one will ever know you were there.
     
  10. YankNBurn

    YankNBurn Owner

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  11. YankNBurn

    YankNBurn Owner

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