re: Some hi-res footage of vehicles vs nukes.

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I'm fascinated by nuke explosions.

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Me too. No idea why.

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Then boooiiiiiii do I have the YouTube playlist for you!

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And down the rabbit hole I go...

It is amazing the thermal speed vs. shock wave. It appears the thermal is near the speed of light and the shock wave is under the sound barrier.

It is the speed of light, because it is light. Think of the sun.

Nuketown is tGOAT map on Black Ops online

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Can I still hide in a fridge? Sounds like a car is not a solid plan.

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Wish White Sands still let people collect trinitite.

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Is that scale exponential or linear? As in, whats the range on a 2 megaton? 14 or 21 miles?

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Thermal energy received from a nuclear device follows the inverse square law. A nuclear device emits energy equally in all directions. So, for the thermal component (which isn't strongly attenuated by air), imagine a sphere with the device at the center. All points at a given radius from the device receive about the same thermal energy. In other words, it's evenly spread over the surface area of the imaginary sphere. Since the surface area of a sphere rises with the square of the radius of the sphere, every time you double your distance, you receive 1/4 the energy.

For yield, if you double the yield, you double the energy output by the device, so you double the energy received at any given distance.

So, if you put the two together, you find that when you double the yield of a device, the thermal effects only reach about 1.4 times as far out as they did from the original device. Return on increasing yield rapidly drops due to the inverse square law. So, if you get third degree burns at 7 miles with 1MT, you'd get third degree burns at about 9.8 miles with 2MT and about 14 miles with 4MT. The largest device ever detonated, the Soviets' Tsar Bomba was a 50 MT device and was capable of causing 3rd degree burns over 50 miles away.

Also, the actual distances that increasing the yield increases the thermal effects in practice are slightly lower than the straight geometry would lead you to believe. While air doesn't attenuate thermal radiation much, it does attenuate. So, the higher in yield you get, the actual distance at which its effects equal a device half its yield falls farther and farther below what the geometry suggests it should be because it's going through more and more air and getting attenuated more and more. In addition, increased yield needs to be detonated higher above the ground to maximize the blast effects, so that also cause the "across the ground" distance for equivalent thermal effects to drop because the fireball is higher in the air.

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TigerstuckinMS

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Years back, I was a scoutmaster. One of the assistant scoutmasters in my troop was an older guy who was an engineer for the corps of engineers. When he was in the military, he became what they called "an Atomic Soldier". In one of the Nevada detonations (post WWII) he was in command of a company of men, who marched out into the desert, dug trenches and lay flat on the ground (I don't know how far away) and then they set off the bomb and what you see in the videos, blasted over them as they "maintained a low profile". Everyone survived, and then every year for the rest of his life, they sent him somewhere and di a full physical on him and ran various tests to see what was going on in his body.


He was a good guy (did all of our tent repairs after campouts for a troop of 95 +- kids), who died a normal, old guy death. No Big C. He never said what percentage of the soldiers in the test group later had problems, and I am sure he knew at least something about the results of the test ran on his men.


I guess the "duck and cover" defense they taught us in elementary school (circa 1956) was based on those tests.