By Aria Bendix
As Russia attacks Ukraine, experts described what would happen in a nuclear strike,
which is unlikely. A modern-day nuclear bomb could wipe out an entire city and cause third-degree burns nearby it. But the strength of a blast depends on the size of the bomb and how it’s detonated.
Related: The 14 Former Soviet Republics That Joined NATO After the Cold War.
Russian forces attacked Ukraine with missile strikes and shelling on Thursday,
kicking off a dramatic escalation of the conflict in the region. Russia has launched about 200 missiles since the start of the attack, a senior US defense official said at a Friday news briefing. At least 25 civilians have been killed in the fighting, according to the latest count from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Security experts hope the conflict won’t broaden to include other countries or devolve into a full-fledged world war. In a speech on Tuesday, President Joe Biden said the US had “no intention of fighting Russia” but added: “The United States and its allies will defend every inch of NATO territory.” The US belongs to NATO, a military alliance consisting mostly of European countries, but Ukraine does not.
A nuclear strike is unlikely but not altogether implausible,
“I hope it doesn’t escalate, and I think there’s a good chance that it doesn’t, but the
risk is real whenever nuclear-armed states are engaged in conflict with one another,”
Tara Drozdenko, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, told Insider.
“Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons, so the risk of nuclear war in this scenario is if, somehow, the conflict escalated to pull in NATO countries or the US,” she added.
“That raises the risk of nuclear confrontation because some of the NATO countries
have nuclear weapons.”
The US has about 5,500 nuclear weapons, while Russia has about 6,000, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Drozdenko told US nukes generally had explosive yields equivalent to about 300 kilotons of TNT, while Russian nukes tended to range from 50 to 100 kilotons to 500 to 800 kilotons, though each country has more powerful nuclear weapons.
“Modern weapons are 20 to 30 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Drozdenko said, adding: “If the US and Russia launched everything that they had, it could potentially be a civilization-ending event.”
Death, starvation, radiation poisoning, and 3rd-degree burns.
Cars scorched during the Dixie Fire in the Indian Falls community of Plumas County, California, on July 25. © AP Photo/Noah Berger
A single nuclear weapon can easily wipe out an entire city, Kathryn Higley, a professor of nuclear science at Oregon State University, told Insider. Video: Ukrainian forces prepare for war in ghost town near Chernobyl (The Washington Post)
“It’s really hard to say, ‘Well, this city will survive, and that city won’t,'” she added.
“It’s very, very dependent on weapon size, what the topography looks like, where they detonate it, who’s upwind, who’s downwind.”
When a nuclear bomb strikes, it sets off a flash of light, a giant orange fireball, and building-toppling shockwaves. People at the center of the explosion (within half a mile for a 300-kiloton bomb) could be killed right away, while others in the vicinity could suffer third-degree burns. A 1,000-kiloton nuclear blast might produce third-degree burns up to 5 miles away, second-degree burns up to 6 miles away, and first-degree burns up to 7 miles away, according to one estimate from Asap Science. People up to 53 miles away could also experience temporary blindness.
“Say you’re in a city, and you are far enough away from the blast center that you don’t
get a lethal dose of radiation — you are very likely going to be injured by a falling building or have third-degree burns over a large portion of your body,” Drozdenko said, adding: “There are not enough empty burn beds in all of the United States to deal with even a single nuclear attack on one city in the US.”
Nuclear explosions also produce clouds of dust and sand like radioactive particles that disperse into the atmosphere — what’s referred to as nuclear fallout. Exposure to this fallout can result in radiation poisoning, which could damage the body’s cells and prove fatal.
Fallout can block sunlight, causing temperatures to drop dramatically and shortening the growing season for essential crops. Drozdenko said crop production could be drastically altered for decades, which would result in famine in some places. If a nuclear weapon hit Washington, DC, it could kill about 300,000 people.
Law-enforcement officers respond to a bomb threat in Washington, DC,
on October 27. © Drew Angerer/Getty Images
4 Key Factors for Surviving Nuclear War (mirasafety.com)
If a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon were to strike a city the size of Washington, DC, many residents wouldn’t survive, and some nearby residents would face devastating injuries.
“A lethal dose of radiation would cover pretty much most of the city and a little bit into Virginia,” Drozdenko said. “The thermal radiation, the heat, is going to go all the way out into parts of Maryland, a little farther into Virginia, and all those folks within that area are going to have third-degree burns.”
Drozdenko estimated that a single nuclear weapon could kill about 300,000 people in the Washington area and injure as many more. Multiple weapons could put the death toll in the millions, she said, depending on how many bombs fell and how powerful the blasts were.
“The bigger the weapon, the bigger the radius,” she said.
The fallout of a nuclear bomb also depends on how a country chooses to detonate it.
If the weapon struck land, the explosion would produce more radioactive fallout as dirt and other materials were thrown into the atmosphere. But if a country detonated the bomb midair, the shockwaves would bounce off the ground and amplify one another, Drozdenko said, which would result in a much larger area of destruction.
This “airburst” could also send radioactive materials as high as 50 miles into the atmosphere, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Countries rely on simulations and weapon tests to anticipate these effects, but it’s difficult to know
how a modern-day nuclear attack would play out in real life.
“There’s no historical precedent for this at all,” Drozdenko said, adding:
“The only time nuclear weapons have been used in a conflict is World War II.”
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Russia’s attack on Ukraine raises a harrowing question: How widespread would fallout from a nuclear bomb be?
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Nuclear Fallout refers to residual radiation after the detonation of a nuclear device
or a leak from a facility that contains radioactive elements such as a power plant.
In the case of a nuclear attack, the fallout would be widespread.
America’s first nuclear bomb test was in southern New Mexico in 1945.
Ever since then, the United States has tested 1054 nuclear weapons.
The effects of these have been widespread throughout the country.
The following excerpt is from —
Aftermath: The Remnants of War by Donovan Webster,
it is describing the testing of a 1-kiloton nuclear bomb in Nevada.
“As the explosion’s light and sound dissipated, the radiation cloud it created rose to join upper atmosphere winds coursing East across the bulk of the American Continent. Over the days to come, the breeze-borne radiation began sifting gently over an unsuspecting nation. Nuclear fallout contaminated wheat in South Dakota. It found milk in Massachusetts.
It was breathed by crabs and oysters in the Chesapeake Bay…Over the next twelve years, 126 atomic weapons would be atmospherically detonated above the Nevada Test Site…Each of these explosions would spread roughly the radiational equivalent of Ukraine’s 1986 Chernobyl reactor fire across an unknowing America.”(130, Webster).
If the American Government conducted these tests in the safest and most controlled ways they possibly could, think of the damage that would occur if another country or group were to use nuclear weapons to attack the United States.
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The radiation from a nuclear war would affect people years after the bombs had been dropped. Depending on whether the bombs were detonated in the air or on the ground, the site could be radioactive for up to 5,000 years. Governments in other nuclear countries conducted tests similar to the ones conducted in the western United States.
These sites also continue to be irradiated and will remain so for thousands of years.
Many health problems would occur if people were exposed to this radiation. Webster demonstrated this with the quotation; “According to National Academy of Sciences and United Nations cancer research, radiation-associated cancers from atmospheric testing will produce at least 400,000 deaths by the year 2000, killing twice as many people as died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
(Webster,132) “In the downwind town of Annabela, Utah (population 187), when three cases of leukemia came to one street in a year-the usual statistic is three cases
per 10,000 people- and cases of bone cancer and thyroid cancer sprouted elsewhere across town, civic father became voluble and furious.”(Webster,156) In that same area, livestock were reported to show birth defects. Atomic testing has stopped in the United States since then.
On August 5, 1963, The United States, Great Britain and Russia all signed
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which stated that they could not test nuclear weapons in
outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere to protect the planet from contamination. (History.com 1) However, a nuclear war would be more catastrophic than the tests ever were. Besides the threat of radiation, there are even more severe consequences that could possibly come from a nuclear war.
One of these is the theory of Nuclear Winter.
This theory states that the ash from burning materials as well as fine sediments
disturbed by the blast would block out the warmth of the sun. This would cause all life on earth to slowly die out. A nuclear war would have irreversible effects on our planet as well as humanity itself.
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By Michael D. Shaw
John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and 90 other people developed cancer after filming
“The Conqueror” near a nuclear testing site – The Vintage News
Chernobyl and Turmeric – Search (bing.com)
Was The Movie the Conqueror Really Cursed?
A Look at Radiation Paranoia:
Few environmental myths have stood the test of time better than the notion that a significant number of the cast and crew of The Conqueror (1956) were felled by cancer, contracted as a result of exposure to radioactive fallout.
Certainly, all the elements of a good story are there. Several above ground atomic tests were run at Yucca Flats in Nevada from 1951-1953, including 11 in 1953 under the name “Operation Upshot-Knothole.” The movie was shot from May-August of 1954 in Snow Canyon State Park, located 11 miles (18 km) northwest of St. George, Utah.
As luck would have it, Snow Canyon is 137 miles (220 km) downwind of Yucca Flats.
To make matters worse, uncredited producer Howard Hughes shipped truckloads of
dirt from the site back to the studio for reshoots.
The Conqueror 1956 with John Wayne and Susan Hayward. Directed By Dick Powell.
The movie premiered on February 22, 1956, in Los Angeles, and less than seven years later, director Dick Powell died of cancer. After Powell, several of the leading actors succumbed to cancer, as well. There was Pedro Armendáriz, who killed himself in
June of 1963, rather than live with his terminal diagnosis.
Agnes Moorehead was the next star of the film to die of cancer, in April of 1974.
She was followed by Susan Hayward (March 1975) and John Wayne, who first contracted lung cancer in September of 1964 and finally died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979.
Public interest was piqued by an article in the November 10, 1980, issue of People magazine, in which it was stated that “Of the Conqueror’s 220 cast in the November 10, 1980, issue of People magazine, in which it was stated that “Of the Conqueror’s 220 cast
and crew members from Hollywood, an astonishing 91 have contracted cancer.”
The article quoted Dr. Robert C. Pendleton, director of radiological health at the University of Utah: “With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic.
The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively.
However, in a group this size you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop.
With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would
hold up even in a court of law.”
This sounds impressive until you do some basic research. According to the National Cancer Institute, at the time the article was written, the overall incidence of being diagnosed with cancer in a person’s lifetime (age-adjusted) was about 40%.
As it happens, this number still holds today. Thus, in a cohort of 220 people,
88 would be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
I have no idea how Pendleton came up with his “30-some.” If anything, given the heavy smoking habits of many in the movie business at the time, including Dick Powell, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendáriz, Susan Hayward, and John Wayne at five packs a day,
91 is completely within the expected range. The only “astonishing” thing is that the People article did not mention the smoking habits of any of the deceased stars.
Bruce Church is a health physicist based in southern Utah, who had been involved with the testing program for years and has done his level best to act as the voice of reason on the issue. Church told me about plaintiff’s attorneys going door to door, trolling for clients in the St. George area in the late 1970s, paving the way for a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits, filed on behalf of the so-called “downwinders.”
He likes to remind those interested in these matters that since 1950, Utah has had
one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the country. Moreover, Washington County—supposedly ground zero for the fallout—has one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the state.
Much was made of an article entitled “Childhood leukemias associated with fallout from nuclear testing,” which appeared in the February 22, 1979, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study spoke of 2.44 times increase in mortality between the high-exposure and
low-exposure cohorts, within the high fallout counties examined. Again, this sounds impressive as long as you ignore the fact that even with this increase, the mortality rate was just slightly above the rate for the entire United States.
As you might expect, this significant qualification is infamously not cited in the dozens of web-based references to the study. And, given that the research effort set out to examine “high fallout” counties to begin with, it is quite suspicious that this group had to be parsed into low and high cohorts, which would only serve to magnify the effects observed. Further studies would continue to bear out negative or de minimis findings.
Thus, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)—passed in 1990—provides for money (typically $50,000) to be paid to victims of certain cancers, who simply have to prove that they lived in a list of counties during a particular time period.
RECA has paid out over $1 billion so far and has produced bountiful results for many Utah-based politicians.
Following the old adage that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, this bounty paid on cancer has simply reinvigorated all the mythology:
If the victims are being compensated, the story must be true!