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?
Depends on the yield of the bomb but if we use the current yield of chinese ICBMs and detonated it above NYC much of Long Island would be just erased and the rest would be leveled. Manhattan would probably just be a flat smoking wasteland.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
On your map most of Long Island is mostly unaffected. It’s 12km moderate blast damage (5 psi) from the Chinese nuke. Long Island goes way off to the east. It’s… long. The “erased” section barely touches any of Long Island. Tsar bomba is a different story.
Goddamn. I was thinking 50-75km tops.
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.
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.
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.
There will be many warheads targeting the NYC area since it’s an economic hub. Most everything on that map will either be glass or on fire.