Surviving a nuke - or indeed any sort of explosion - is a very weird and complicated matter. If you're exposed on a flat open plain you're going to be toast at a considerable distance from ground zero. But you're pretty much never going to be exposed on a flat plain. There's gonna be terrain, buildings, and stuff between you and the kaboom. I've seen footage from Iraq and Afghanistan of large IEDs detonating, and people who are quite close to the blast left alive (tho I'm sure not uninjured) because there was some peculiarity of the space between their body and the blast that prevented the full force of it from hitting them. With a nuke it's not just the blast wave, but the heat pulse and the radiation. Within a certain distance from the burst you're going to be vaporized unless you've got several meters of heavy shielding around you. Even then you're not going to be happy. But these things are more survivable than most people think they are. Of course, with a nuke you've got quite an unpleasant aftermath to deal with, but the initial kaboom might not kill you. I live just outside the beltway around DC in northern Virginia. So a target-rich environment if we're talking a strategic nuclear exchange. Probably gonna be bacon bits if the balloon goes up. But a terrorist nuke detonating on Capitol Hill or at the Pentagon probably wouldn't even set my trees on fire. Might not even break my windows, depending on various circumstances. I think I'd still skedaddle out of the immediate area, tho. Earthquakes. Data seems to indicate that an underground structure is safer than an above ground one, since the waves would be passing around you on all sides and your structure would move with them. In a building above ground, the ground shakes and moves while the building "whiplashes" in response. Very dangerous. It's sort of the difference between the handle of a whip and the end of it in terms of energy transfer. The idea of duck-and-cover had several purposes. First, to establish a conditioned response to an event so that you could act without thinking too much and in theory reduce panic and confusion. Second, to make yourself a smaller target for blast effects and high-speed debris. Third, to give you some kind of hope that a bright flash didn't mean instant death, tho in a nuclear war instant death would probably be the optimum outcome. Them's my thoughts.
color me "NOT FUCKING SURPRISED IN THE LEAST" over a bad design. As a technician (not an engineer) quite often I am working with equipment that has obvious issues that turn into major problems and these design defects are so fucking obvious they scream out to anyone who has "boots on the ground" experience.
I'd lay it at Kim's doorstep. "See, see? Donnie made me do it!" The one thing Fat Man and Little Boy have in common is an ability to place the blame on someone else. Or it could be Donnie's BFF Vladi and his hackers.
Speaking of, and directly related to your post above, it is possible to get nuked and live to tell the tale - the guy that had the misfortune to be in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima when Fat Man and Little Boy dropped comes to mind.
that warms my heart - maybe there is a god, and our younger generation just might keep the world turning when I cast off this mortal coil.
So world is ending gotta go out and rape. Ooooops false alarm gotta get rid of the blueballs and do some cardio so I can catch me a woman next time the world is ending. Evil hot women and their fit bits make it hard for obese American men to get their last rocks off at the end of the world. I do hope that is just my cynicism and not the real reason for the spike.
this thread examines needing a change of underwear from watching a lot of porn.....or as I like to call it Tuesday!
Gotta love that competency of state gov'ment. But I guess that learn from the MOST BESTEST. The FEDERALIST'S.