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What would be the devastation of the most
powerful nuclear bomb dropped on New York City,
within 2 miles, within 6 miles, within 10 miles,
within 30 miles? |
Question Date: 2016-10-28 | | Answer 1:
I can't answer all of that, but the Soviet "Tsar"
bomb had a fireball (a sphere of plasma created by
the gamma rays coming out of the bomb) about five
miles in diameter, so your distance two miles from
the center of the blast would be ionized into a
plasma like the matter that makes up the sun.
This fireball would have roughly the
temperature of the surface of the sun when the
bomb detonated. The sun takes up a half a degree
of angle in the sky, so using the arcsine of that
I get that you would have had to be about 570
miles away for this ball of plasma to have the
same width in the sky (and thus the amount of heat
that it's radiating) as the sun. Given this
brightness, I would expect that anything within
your 30-mile radius would be incinerated by the
heat of the explosion. Indeed, all of the
buildings of a Soviet test site 34 miles from the
blast were destroyed, although I don't know if
this was due to the heat or the shockwave. In
fact, a nuke that size dropped on New York would
probably cause noticeable damage as far away as
Boston or Philadelphia.
| | Answer 2:
Unfortunately, there have been examples of
nuclear bomb explosions in the past. For example,
the United States bombed Hiroshima, Japan in 1945
during World War II. This bomb was released by a
B-52 plane and killed at least 129,000 people
for the initial bombing and later by radiation
poisoning and cancer. The destruction
(including loss of lives, injuries, and damage to
buildings) of a nuclear bomb depends on the size
or power of the bomb and whether it is released
from the air or on the surface. I found this
online application where you can select a location
and size of nuclear weapon to see how much
destruction would occur. The link is: nuclear
secrecy
I can't speak to the accuracy of the
application, but it will allow you to test
destruction resulting from a range of explosion
scenarios. Click Here to return to the search form.
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