[mikeash]

I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I've seen a lot of misconceptions that make them seem much worse than they are (although they are still quite terrible).

Common myth: any nuclear explosion causes total destruction for miles in every direction. Because of this, old drills like "duck and cover" were foolishness at best and cold-blooded ways to placate the populace at worse.

Fact: the area of total destruction is fairly small. Most injuries and deaths by most bombs would be caused by flying debris. Duck and cover is a great way to increase people's chances of survival. If you're right at ground zero then you're still screwed, but there are potentially millions of people living at distances where structures would overall survive but taking cover would greatly help their chances of survival. I blame this on pictures of Hiroshima from after the bombing there, where nearly everything is just wiped clean. People don't realize that this is because most of the buildings in the city were practically built out of paper.

Common myth: following a nuclear explosion, the area will be too contaminated to live in for centuries or millennia.

Fact: the really nasty stuff decays in days or weeks. It may not be the healthiest place to be long-term, but months or years after the event, it's not generally going to be a big deal. Witness the distinct lack of widespread contamination and abandonment in modern-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example.

Common myth: a full-scale nuclear war would destroy all life on the planet. OK, all complex life. Well, all human life.

Fact: while it would be an event without precedent in both its size and speed, lots of people would still survive. It would pretty thoroughly wreck civilization and easily kill hundreds of millions or even billions of people, but life would, overall, go on. Many countries would escape the devastation and, while their economics would have extreme trouble due to the devastation of global trade, they would not revert to a pre-industrial state or anything like it. Expect a future with technological advances slowed down greatly and dominated by Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, and possibly Australia, not a future filled with radioactive wastelands and handfuls of survivors waiting for death in underground bunkers.

Common myth: the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion will wipe out electronics in the region.

Fact: most nuclear explosions don't produce EMP. You only get it when they're set off in the upper atmosphere, as the EMP comes from the interaction of gamma rays with sparse gasses and the Earth's magnetic field. An attacker with the capability would be wise to set such a thing off over the US, but, for example, a terrorist nuke in New Jersey isn't going to wipe the computers on Wall Street.

Common myth: despite all of the above misconceptions, nuclear weapons are still tremendously frightening and we're all extremely lucky that the Cold War never went hot.

Fact: no, this one is definitely right.

[skaevola]

Can you cite sources for these claims? I've found it's very hard to find good scientific sources for the effects, but all of the research I've done on the topic suggests that you are grossly underestimating the effects.

Here is an example: http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abolition-Stanford-Nuclear-Serie...

And here is another terrifying account of the effects of a nuclear explosion:

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/tenw/nuke_...

And another good source which shows just how destructive a bomb would be on a major metropolitan area:

http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

[mikeash]

I'm not sure what your first link says, but the other two generally seem to agree with me. The second one gets EMP wrong, as everyone does, but Wikipedia covers it well enough:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

I'm rather confused as to why you think that map suggests that I'm grossly underestimating the effects. It lines up perfectly. For example, select a Topol and put it over downtown Manhattan. You see that the fireball covers a few blocks, the death-by-radiation zone covers most of downtown, as does the destroy-all-buildings zone, the destroy-residential-buildings zone reaches up to Central Park, parts of Brooklyn, and into New Jersey, and severe burns for exposed people and random fires started by the flash goes out to most of Manhattan, much of Brooklyn, and big chunks of New Jersey. The zone in which "duck and cover" would save lives (outside the death-by-radiation area, inside the death-by-collapsing-residential-buildings-and-flying-glass area) covers almost 100km^2 and probably a couple of million people.

[ddebernardy]

> I blame this on pictures of Hiroshima from after the bombing there, where nearly everything is just wiped clean. People don't realize that this is because most of the buildings in the city were practically built out of paper.

But then, you do realize that today's nukes are orders of magnitude stronger, right?

[icegreentea]

Well, so Hiroshima/Nagasaki were 15-20kT weapons. While there was a while were the US and Russia were routinely plopping 5MT+ weapons on strategic platforms, these days its more down to 100-400kT range, so we're already sitting at ~one order of magnitude for most common nuclear device that'll go off near you. Granted, there will be a lot of them, but still.

Ok, so outside of the immediate fireball, the majority of immediate damage is going to be caused by overpressure, which will obey square distance law. So you're 20x weapon will only cause ~4.5x the overpressure at some distance.

So now its civil engineering of modern buildings vs whatever they had at Nagasaki/Hiroshima. I honestly cannot answer this, but I suspect that they could probably sustain twice the overpressure at least. So you're actual lethality (from building collapse) at set distance is only about ~2x despite the ~10x increase in weapon power.

Now, it's all kinda moot cause there's not going to be 'just one nuke'.

For your enjoyment and horror, http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ you can watch how dead you'll be.

[ddebernardy]

Thank you for the sane and argumented response.

[mikeash]

Bigger nukes increase the area of total destruction but they also increase the area of partial destruction. Furthermore, the area of total destruction is still not going to be big enough to cover an entire metropolitan area unless you're talking about something along the lines of Tsar Bomba. The point remains that civil defense procedures like "duck and cover" would save many lives.

[ddebernardy]

As would "run for underground shelters", admittedly.

But then you're assuming reasonable and conscious plebes. Personally, I'd readily picture rednecks going "Meh, they won't finance these shelters on my dime lest it turn into yet another .gov fiasco, and I wouldn't budge anyway because .gov is just scaremongering us into living in rabit holes! I'm ME and I'm invincible. [Roar!]"

Plus, your story doesn't say if whoever goes for a subterranean shelter or ducks eventually digs her way back out. (I'd hope we never know if it does.)

[mikeash]

I'm not sure I understand your point here. It doesn't take a whole lot of reasonableness to take cover when you know you're about to be hit by a massive blast wave. As for digging out, many of the survivors will just be able to climb out from the rubble. Escaping death by fallout then becomes interesting for many, but that won't affect many others.

[stefantalpalaru]

>months or years after the event, it's not generally going to be a big deal

Strontium-90 [1] has a half-life of 28.79 years and gets concentrated in bones causing bone cancers and leukemia.

Caesium-137 [2] has a half-life of 30.17 years and concentrates in soft tissues.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90

[2]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/wessells1/