Playing around with nuclear weapons in videos is fun. There's a visceral joy in blowing things up, and a horrifying fascination with things
like fireballs, shockwaves, and radiation. And while it does help put our destructive
power in perspective, it's not the best way of understanding
the real impact of a nuclear explosion. This isn't about silly stacks of TNT, or about how bright an explosion is. Nuclear weapons are about you. So we've partnered with the Red Cross
and Red Crescent movement to explore what would really happen if a nuclear weapon were detonated in a major city today. Not nuclear war, just one explosion. *Kurzgesagt Intro Music* We begin our story in the middle of
downtown in a major city. People are going to work, studying for exams, are lost in their thoughts and daily lives. Right here a nuclear weapon is detonated
and time freezes. The first phase of the explosion happens
within less than a second. In a millisecond, a ball of plasma hotter than the Sun appears and grows in a fireball to more than 2 kilometres across. Within this ball, everyone is just gone. Think of water dripped on to a very hot pan. A sizzle, and then there's nothing. Most buildings, cars, trees,
tacky sculptures and people... ... all evaporated. First, the flash: an intense tsunami of light washes over the city in an instant. If you happen to have your head pointed in the direction of the explosion, it renders you blind for a few hours. The heat of this light produces a thermal pulse, so energetic and hot that it just burns everything as far as 13 kilometres from the detonation site. What this means is that everything in an area of 500 square kilometres that is able to burn, starts burning. Plastic, wood, fabric, hair, and skin. If you happen to be in reach of the thermal pulse, one moment, you're on your way to work, the next moment, you're on fire. Now the second phase begins. It happens in a few seconds. Most people will now first notice
that something is wrong, but it's already too late for hundreds of thousands. The flash is followed by the shockwave. The heat and radiation of the fireball create a bubble of superheated and super-compressed air around it that's now expanding explosively. Faster than the speed of sound, creating winds stronger than hurricanes and tornadoes. Human infrastructure is no match for its power. Most major buildings within a kilometre of the fireball are just ground up down to their base. Only steel reinforced concrete is able to
partially resist the pressure. In the surrounding parks where retirees feed the ducks, trees blackened and smoldering from the heat a second before snap like toothpicks. If you're outside, you get tossed away
like a grain of dust in a tornado. The shockwave weakens as it travels outwards but still, about 175 square kilometres of houses collapse like they're made of cards, trapping tens of thousands of people
who didn't have any time to react. Gas stations explode and fire spread
throughout the rubble. A mushroom cloud made from the remains of the fireball, dust and ash rises kilometres into the sky in the next few minutes and casts a dark shadow over the ruined city. This violently pulls in fresh air surrounding the city, destroying more buildings and providing
an abundance of oxygen. It depends on the city what happens next. If there's enough fuel, fires may turn into a firestorm that burns the rubble, everybody trapped in it and people trying to flee the devastation. Up to 21 kilometres from the explosion, people just like you rush to their windows to take pictures of the mushroom cloud, unaware that the shockwave is still coming at them, about to shatter their windows and create
a blizzard of sharp glass. The third phase begins in the coming hours and days. We're used to the idea that help will come,
no matter the disaster. This time is different: a nuclear explosion is like every natural disaster at once. There are hundreds of thousands or millions of people with serious injuries: lacerations, broken bones, serious burns. In the next few minutes and hours, thousands more will die because of these injuries. Countless people are trapped in collapsed buildings like in earthquakes or blinded by the flash, deaf from the blast wave and unable to flee through streets impassable with rubble and debris. They're terrified, confused, and don't know what's happened to them or why. Most likely, many hospitals have been leveled along with all the other buildings and most medical professionals are either dead or injured, along with everyone else. The survivors lucky enough to have been in metro tunnels or standing in the right place to be unburned and unhurt won't have truly escaped harm yet. Depending on the type of weapon, where it explodes and even the weather, an awful black rain can begin, with radioactive ash and dust descending on the city, covering everything and everyone. The invisible, malicious, silent horror of
radiation takes its turn. Every breath carries poison to the lungs of the survivors. Over the coming days, the people who receive the highest doses of radiation exposure will die. There will be no help, not for hours or maybe even days. Civilisation doesn't operate when
there is a total breakdown of infrastructure. Roads are blocked, train tracks warped, runways cluttered with rubble. No water, no electricity, no communication, no stores to replenish supplies from. Help from surrounding cities will have a hard time entering the disaster zone and even if they can, the radioactive contamination will make it risky to get too close. After a nuclear attack, you're on your own. So, bit by bit, people emerge from the rubble on foot, contaminated with radioactive fallout, carrying what little they may have left. They are slow, in pain, traumatized, and they all need food, water and medical treatment fast. And the damage done by a nuclear weapon doesn't end when the fires burn out and the smoke clears. The hospitals in the neighboring cities are under-equipped for a disaster of this scale and overwhelmed with tens or hundreds of thousands of patients with serious injuries. In the weeks, months and years to come, many of those who survived will succumb to cancers like leukemia. The reason no government wants you to think about all this is because there is no serious humanitarian response possible to a nuclear explosion. There's no way to really help the immediate victims of a nuclear attack. This is not a hurricane, wildfire or earthquake or nuclear accident. It is all of these things at once, but worse. No nation on earth is prepared to deal with it. The world has changed in the past few years, with world leaders again explicitly and publicly threatening each other with nuclear weapons. Many experts think the danger of a nuclear strike is higher than it has been in decades. Governments tell their citizens that it's good that we have nuclear weapons, but it's bad when anyone else gets them. That it's somehow necessary to threaten others with mass destruction to keep us safe. But does this make you feel safe? It only takes a small group of people with power to go crazy or rogue, a small misstep or a simple misunderstanding to unleash a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Exploding stuff in videos is fun. Exploding things in real life, not so much. There is a solution though! Eliminating all nuclear weapons
and vowing never to build them again. In 2017, almost 2/3 of all the world's countries, supported by hundreds of civil society organizations and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement agreed to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. It's not about who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't. The weapons themselves are the problem. They are deeply immoral and an existential threat to all of us. No matter what country you come from, no matter what political side you find yourself on, we need to demand that they disappear forever. This will not happen without pressure. If you want to be part of this pressure, there are things you personally can do too: Visit notonukes.org to learn more about nuclear weapons and what you can do about them. *Kurzgesagt Outro Music*
[In space, nobody can hear you- *QUACK*] *Kurzgesagt Outro Music* S
Much more existential dread than I need for a Sunday night if i'm honest
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
So, for my first assignment in the Air Force, I worked on B-52s which are a nuclear capable platform.
Because of that, I had to get accepted into the Personal Reliability Program. Which is the Department of Defense's way of tracking who is able to work around nuclear weapons without compromising the mission.
If anyone is interested in learning about it, AFI 91-101 is actually an extremely interesting read on procedures for working around/with nuclear weapons.
There are, rightfully, a lot of procedures for avoiding damage to nuclear weapons including not being allowed to fly over nuclear shelters or being allowed to point aircraft with guns in the direction of shelters when you're parking said aircraft.
Edit: lmao nice try
Edit 2: I’ve opened myself up to the meme trap
Edit 3: My DMs are now the Reddit equivalent of that guy from American Dad asking about launch codes.
For a live action depiction of what would happen if a city was nuked, watch Threads. Scientists have called it the most realistic depiction of the nuking a city and the aftermath.
It's simply the most depressing and dreadful piece of media I've ever seen. If there was a rating just based on that, Grave of the Fireflies and Chernobyl would be 7. Threads would be a hard 10.
Here's a taste, and that's is not even the worst part of the film.
They don’t disclose a yield in the video, but I’m estimating a
3 Megaton1.2 megaton blast is what they are talking about. Thing is,3 megaton1.2 megaton weapons are rare these days. Most modern nuclear weapons are in the hundreds of Kilotons.Before you think I’m trying to downplay the problem, smaller nukes are WORSE than big ones! You can cram up do a dozen smaller nukes onto a missile instead of one big one. It’s called MIRV, and it is basically a nuclear shotgun. Yes, that’s as terrible as it sounds.
So in reality the above city wouldn’t get hit with one big nuke, but a dozen smaller ones. That spreads the damage even further thanks to the
squareinverse cube law. It also means the loose debris from one nuclear blast gets ignited by another. Multiple nuclear explosions in this situation is practically guaranteed to produce a firestorm. Everyone in that city WILL die, horribly.That is ONE missile, with multiple warheads hitting ONE city. Now imagine hundreds of missiles, hitting hundreds of cities, and you start to see the scale.
Tl;dr - It’s way more fucked up than the video shows.
Edit: Want
some nightmare fuelthe gory details of a nuclear attack on a city? Read this: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nukergv.htmlFantastic video, but how realistic would it be to truly get rid of all nuclear weapons?
Technology doesn't just go away after you dismantle it. The know-how and desire to build nukes could re-emerge in the future, whether it be after 10 years or 10 generations.
Pandora's box has been opened. This is no longer an option.
Well, that's absolutely terrifying. Their animation did a really good job visualizing it though.
John Hersey's journalistic collection from eyewitnesses to the first atomic bombing, Hiroshima (PDF)
I made the lucky mistake of reading that book when I was young enough to think war was really cool. When I got to this part, and this isn't even the first or last description of eyes melting out of peoples' heads as they cry on the ground waiting to die, it instantly radicalised me against such horrific weapons and anyone keen to use them.