Nuclear Bomb Explosion Effects With Diagram

If you live very close to a likely nuclear bomb target you do not have much chance of surviving. You can think about it a little and know what a lot of these sort of targets would be. Fortunately, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. Some examples of must-shoot-targets would be important military bases, like where I grew up during part of my childhood. That was Vandenberg Air Force Base. 


If you live near one of these places, I suggest you either move, or get a bug out location far away and spend as much of your time there as possible. You can hope the nuke hits while you are at your bug out location. If you can not manage a bug out location and you are stuck in a nukeable location, I recommend gallows humor. 


My siblings and I found this very helpful. During the Cuban missile crisis we lived a lot less than a hundred miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base. We were acutely aware that we were toast if missiles started flying. We used to joke about whether we would be parboiled or incinerated if the water evaporated when a missile struck while we were in the bathtub. This struck us as hilarious to the consternation of our, possibly more sane, mother. 


I have found some sites with cute little calculators on them, so you can calculate whether you will be baked, broiled or fried, or should go ahead and build a fallout shelter. I would build one as long as I lived at least 12-15 miles from a nukeable location. I live in Alaska, but am too close to a military base to survive a hit now. Gallows humor it is. I also am making plans to move.


There is even a site that has a round slide rule that you can print out on paper and slide transparencies.  It amounts to a small nuke damage computer. It will help you rapidly calculate all kinds of nuclear effects. You probably know that radiation is the damage that lasts longest and goes the farthest. If you are far enough from a nukeable site, your fallout shelter's main job would be to protect you from radiation. You should make the radiation exposure device that I posted about yesterday and keep one in your shelter and in your bug out bag.


If you live closer to a nukeable location you will need to prepare a shelter that will protect you from other sorts of nuclear blast damages.


Here is a diagram that I drew to give you an idea of what would happen to you and the buildings around you at close distance to ground zero of a nuclear blast.

My apologies for the mess. This was extraordinarily difficult to research because bomb blast effects were described using different sized bombs and air blasts versus ground ones, etc. All of the information is a very rough estimate anyway. The wind direction and weather can even make a big difference in what happens, especially to people.


Bigger bombs will cause more damage, but not the same kind of damage. I gather that thermal damage and the EMP damage are the factors most increased by larger bombs. The rest of the damages are not changed that much.


Here is the link to the little round paper and clear plastic computer you can make to help you calculate your local damages from a nuke blast.


http://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/instructions.html


It is considered an historical document now, so I am not certain that it will work for bigger modern bombs. It is not so far in the past that it will not work at all, however.


The book site I linked to yesterday has instructions to help you build a safe nuclear shelter. There are lots of other sites on the subject as well. I think it is a good idea to look at several before you decide what you want to build. The shelters vary quite a lot. 

You Can Survive A Nuclear Blast

The type and severity of damage from a nuclear disaster depends on how close you are to it and how big the blast is. Other factors matter as well, such as weather, wind direction and type of bomb. Whether the bomb explodes at or near the ground will also greatly affect radiation exposure. The only way to know how much radiation you have received is to have a device that will measure the amount of radiation you have been dosed with. I have included a links to a site where you can download a book that tells you how to make your own simple device to let you know how much radiation you have gotten. 


This information will allow you to make good choices to be able to survive a nuclear disaster. 


FEMA's site says that People will get very sick at 90 Rs. They also say that you will receive that dose when you are 250 miles away from a nuclear strike. (That is assuming a strike by a 1 megaton bomb.)


Other US nuclear preparedness sites say that if you are in even a very basic shelter, you can survive a much closer nuclear strike. 


Below is information about the book that includes how to make your own device (a KLM,) to measure the dose of radiation that you have received.



"Untrained families, guided only by these written instructions and using only low cost materials and tools found in most homes, have been able to make a KFM by working 3 or 4 hours. By studying the operating sections of these instructions for about IV2 hours, average untrained families have been able to success fully use this fallout meter to measure dose rates and to calculate radiation doses received, permissible times of exposure, etc.




The KFM (Kearny Fallout Meter) was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is understandable, easily repairable, and as accurate as most civil defense fallout meters. In the United States in 1986 the least expensive commercially available dose-rate meter that is accurate and dependable and that measures high enough dose rates for wartime use is a British instrument that retails for $375. Comparable American instruments retail for over $1000.





A KFM is a simple electroscope-ionization chamber fallout meter with which fallout radiation can be measured accurately.


The long term penalty which would result from a dose of 100 R received within a few weeks is much less than many Americans fear. If 100 average persons received an external dose of 100R during and shortly after a nuclear attack, the studies of the Japanese A-bomb survivors indicate that no more than one of them is likely to die during the following 30 years as a result of this 100R radiation dose. These delayed radiation deaths would be due to leukemia and other cancers. In the desperate crisis period following a major nuclear attack, such a relatively small shortening of life expectancy during the following 30 years should not keep people from starting recovery work to save themselves and their fellow citizens from death due to lack of food and other essentials."

Here is the link to the whole book on preparing for and dealing with nuclear disasters. It includes instructions for making your own radiation meter. It is in PDF and another format. You can download the whole book on condition that you always keep the copyright information on it.
http://www.homelandcivildefense.org/nwss/nwss.pdf

There are 317 pages in this book. I think everyone in the world who is capable of it should read it. We have too many trigger-happy world leaders, and terrorists, with too many bombs to ignore this information safely.


The book has how to build your own shelter along with blast doors and air filters that you can make. If you read this book and use it, you will have a good chance of surviving a nuclear disaster in good health.

What Happens Near A Nuclear Blast?

You probably already know that the area closer to a nuclear bomb when it blows up, the worse the damage will be. Experts have made diagrams and charts telling us things like how far away you need to be to avoid having your eardrums blown out, for example. You have to be very close for that to happen, you may be relieved to know.


The furthest out immediate result is a burn that is equivalent to a bad sunburn. At maximum range for these burns, it will occur only on exposed skin. Something as simple as duck and cover is enough to protect you from this and other hazards. You have only seconds to duck and cover to protect yourself between the flash of the explosion and the other more dangerous effects reaching you. If you realize what the flash is and react immediately, you can avoid a lot of the potential damage to your body.


If nuclear alert sirens are activated while nuclear missiles are still in the air, you will have more time to take good shelter before detonation.


One of the effects of a nuclear weapons detonation in the air is called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP for short. I have already posted on EMPs earlier. I will explain it again here, with the short version. What you need to know about an EMP is that it will destroy electronics. That includes all vehicles less than 30 years old, most household items that include electronics, and commercial, industrial, and military electronics. That will include most, if not all power plants in the USA.


The USA is not very well prepared for EMPs. Some effort has been made to prepare for them, but those efforts are based on EMPs that are much smaller than modern nuclear weapons will generate. That means the things protected against smaller EMPs, than the one that hits them, will be wiped out anyway.


Areas that are not hit by the EMPs will still have working electronics. That means if you have a radio that is protected from EMPs, you can take it out after the EMP hits your area, and listen to broadcasts from outside your area. After a nuclear disaster, information could be especially crucial to your survival. Having a radio that is protected from EMPs might save your life some day.


The size of the nuclear explosion changes the size of the area affected and how far away you need to be from it to avoid various kinds of injuries. If you wish to have or prepare a shelter for nuclear disaster preparedness the size and closeness to the blast will affect what materials you want in your shelter and how thick it needs to be to protect you.


There are handy charts on the internet that say how thick your shelter walls need to be depending on what kind of damage you wish to shield against and  how close you are to the blast.


We can make educated guesses about the most attractive targets for an enemy nuclear weapon or multiple nuclear weapons for the most attractive targets. 


If you live in a country that has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them, you probably have enemies of your country that have nuclear weapons also. Most likely the other country or countries that have nuclear weapons to use against your country will pick certain types of targets over others. Examples of these attractive targets are government centers, military and weapons centers, and manufacturing and financial centers. 


If your residence is near one of these type of centers, you can either move, or make yourself a shelter. You could also do my personal favorite, move and make yourself a shelter. 


I intend to post about the damage done at various distances from a nuclear disaster. I plan to provide both diagrams and charts and will give both miles and kilometers. I expect to do an entire post on terrorist detonation of a nuclear weapon. They are different than most other nuclear disasters.

Nuclear Disaster Preparedness

The average citizen of any country can feel powerless about preventing a nuclear disaster. We often forget that there are a lot more of us than there are "important" people with access to a button to launch those nukes and a nice safe shelter. The Occupy people told us that enough. They did not seem to accomplish a lot else, but the idea that we are the 99% of the population is a good thing for us to keep in mind.


The Occupy people did not agree on much except general dissatisfaction. I believe staying alive is something a lot of people can agree on.


The best way to survive a nuclear disaster is to not have one in the first place.  If we start nuclear weapons flying back and forth, most of us will die. Maybe we won't die right away, but nuclear radiation is one of those "gifts" that keeps on giving. They are finding radioactive fish due to the Japanese nuclear accident still. We can expect this to continue.


According to materials I read to research this post, a family in Nagasaki were in a large shelter when the US nuclear bomb detonated there. They were less than two miles from ground zero. They did not even have closed doors on the shelter they were in, but they survived the nuclear blast.


Ordinarily, people who are in normal buildings so close to ground zero are killed immediately. This tells us that nuclear bomb detonations are survivable. I have found a great number of sites about nuclear bomb detonations and accidents. Many of them have information to allow you to learn enough to survive. There is a great deal of information, including whole books about this.


I am working my way through it and plan to share it on this blog. It will require a great many posts to do this. I always hope that readers will be motivated to study the information that I post about on their own. This blog is not set up for in depth coverage of all the topics I post here. If you really want to be prepared thoroughly, you need to know more than I post.


I believe that most of my readers do not or can not do a lot of studying on my post topics, elsewhere. Because of that, I make attempts to cover especially important topics more in depth. I believe that preparedness for surviving a nuclear disaster is especially important. 


One of the reasons that I place so much importance on surviving a nuclear disaster, is that I think almost all, or all of the people in the world will have to deal with the consequences of nuclear disaster. 


We have already experienced Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernova, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima  Daiichi. We can expect more nuclear disasters. Future nuclear disasters will most likely be worse than the aforementioned ones.


I plan to post first about what happens at different distances from Ground Zero of a nuclear blast. This allows one to understand what the hazards are and how to prepare to survive them.

Plan To Survive A Nuclear Disaster

There were movies and teachers telling us what to do to be safe from a nuclear bomb when I lived on Vandenberg Air Force Base. I found one of the movies they showed us. It is here at this link:

http://archive.org/details/DuckandC1951

We used to have Civil Defense Wardens in every neighborhood. They were in charge of nuclear fallout shelters and were supposed to help people in their area get into the shelters in an orderly manner so that they would be safe.

One of my neighbors was a Civil Defense Warden. He had a special helmet, armband, and jacket as a sign of his office. He took his job very seriously and checked the stocks of supplies in his shelter regularly and made sure they were locked up safely for many years. He kept doing this for many years after the government had forgotten all about him, the shelter, and probably the whole program.

The government of the USA no longer does much about protecting citizens from nuclear fallout hazards. I gather the supplies in the old shelters were left to spoil or be stolen or vandalized. Even shelters are no longer maintained or built. They used to be clearly labelled. This is not done now.

The US government still makes nuclear shelters now, but they are not for everyone. They are only for "important" people. If you do not already know where one of these shelters is and have a place in it, then you are on your own to take care of yourself.

Some people do not want to prepare for nuclear attack because they do not consider it to be survivable. If that was the case, there would not be shelters for "important" people. 

I believe that everyone is important and deserves to survive a nuclear attack, or accident. I also believe it is possible for ordinary people to find ways to protect themselves from the effects of a nuclear attack. 

If you are feeling unsure about whether you should bother to work on being prepared for a nuclear disaster, I wish to help you to decide to bother.

If you prepare yourself for a nuclear disaster and you are vaporized and never get to use your preparations, you will have nothing on earth to worry about. Your preparations will not be helpful to you any more. They will not hurt you either.

If you do not prepare for a nuclear disaster and survive anyway, you are going to be in trouble and have an uncomfortable time trying to stay alive. 

I believe it is better to be prepared and not need it, because you are dead, than it is to not prepare and wish you had. I think that you have a choice to prepare for a nuclear disaster and be able to survive it. I hope that you will resolve to take this chance.

 

I intend to do more posts to give you ideas on what preparations that you can make to survive a nuclear disaster.

Is Nuclear War Preparedness Necessary?

My research on claims by various countries on the North Pole area turned up repeated references that mentioned the likelihood of war. It is known that the North Pole has oil and other valuable minerals and suspected that it is full of other valuable minerals that are not even known yet.


Many Americans have mentioned to me that they do not believe nuclear war is likely to happen. This is so far off from what the American government has said about nuclear war, that it is scary. Uninformed citizens are allowing their government to do as it wishes.


During the Bush administration, he announced worldwide that he was going to disregard the nuclear disarmament treaty that the USA had signed with Russia. He expressed the intention to not only stop dismantling nuclear weapons, but to return to making more of them. 


Later on, Bush announced that, "first strike was back on the table". This was in reference to nuclear weapons. First strike means to launch nuclear weapons before anyone else does. In other words he was saying he was willing to start a nuclear war.


President Obama has not taken a first strike off the table. This means he is willing to start a nuclear war.


It is highly unlikely that nobody will shoot back if the USA starts launching nuclear weapons. If any readers missed watching USA missiles being launched to shoot down incoming enemy missiles, they don't work that well. It is not a healthy choice to depend on no missiles landing in the USA.


Part of my childhood was spent on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This is one of the two top  missile bases in the USA. The other is Cape Canaveral/Kennedy. 


Many nights' sleep were interrupted by the bass rumble and shaking of missile launches. For quite a while after they began, everyone ran outside to watch. The sky was lit up with an eerie glow as the missile left the launching pad and you could see the arc of the exhaust as it soared into the air.


I believe I was 9 years old when this started. Even then, I wondered how much different it would look if the missile was coming toward us. I knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wondered about what the people there saw.


My school had frequent nuclear drills since we were acknowledged to be a prime enemy target. When sirens went off every one was supposed to dive under their desk, crouch down, and put their hands over the backs of their necks. 


I had already read that Vandenberg was ground zero for enemy missiles. That included the whole base area. That included my school.


I had also read that within a certain radius of ground zero there were 100% fatalities. We were close enough to be vaporized by a nuclear strike. I refused to get under my desk. 


My teacher made the mistake of asking me in front of the class why I did not want to get under my desk. I answered what I had read. Something I had read said that the correct position to assume during a nuclear attack if you were at ground zero was to "bend over and kiss your *ss goodbye". My classmates thought my answer was hilarious because it had the *ss word in it. Most of them did not immediately understand what it meant to their safety.


I am not sure grown up Americans are much more informed on these matters. If we, as a group, do not become better informed, we can kiss our *sses goodbye. Our government is not looking out for our safety.


That means you will have to take care of yourself. I intend to post more about this and how you can take care of yourself. 

Search Engine Use Survival Skill

If you know enough about the internet to find my blog you can use the internet to help yourself prepare for emergencies.You can pick a subject that you need to know more about to become prepared for disasters and use a search engine to find out about it.


An example of this could be how to start a fire. A lot of people do not know how to start a fire without matches and other equipment. You may be one of them and have realized that this problem could get you killed in an emergency.


Pick your favorite search engine. I am going to use Google, although it is not my favorite, because it is so popular. I started with an obvious search term, how to start fires without matches". Google gave me about 114 million results in a few seconds. The top one is, "How To Start A Fire
Without Matches", on the site, 
This search engine result 
http://artofmanliness.com/2008/04/29/9-ways-to-
start-a-fire-without-matches/ 
came up number one on Google.


This site has nine different ways to start fires 
without matches. They range from difficult to do 
ones to some that most people could manage with
the right tools, like a swedish firesteel, army model, 
sold on Amazon for About $15 - $40 dollars.


If none of those 9 ways to start fires with matches 
suits you, you could continue down the page of 
Google results and see if anything else is right for 
you. If you don't think so, you can keep looking on 
the next page of 114million results, or try another 
search term. That could be something like, "fire 
without matches". The results are much the same as 
the previous search term results.


You could try, "survival fire" as a search term. That 
one produces about a billion results in .23 seconds.
The fourth search result down the page is interesting. 
It is http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Skills/Fire/
Fire.htm


This site starts off telling you that it is for those who already have some survival skills. He then tells you the basic requirements to have a fire and keep it going. I think the fire requirements are good basics as long as you are willing to practice making fires. When you are shivering in the middle of a disaster is not the time to learn fire-making skills. 


He also has some items to help out those with less skills. One of these is kind of difficult to use without practice and he says so on his site. He gives up on the use of a fire piston that he made himself. He is assuming that one would use available materials to build a fire with a fire piston. I have not used a fire piston myself, but have read enough to know they don't assume you start with materials at hand to build a fire with a fire piston. 


Some fire pistons even have small compartments inside them to hold extra supplies for fire making. Some of the suggestions I have read are cotton balls covered with vaseline and shredded twine to start from the vaseline cotton ball. Another is char cloth. You can buy it, but it is not hard to make. It is fabric that you have allowed to start burning and then blown out while there was still a lot of the fabric left to start a fire. Another that I particularly like is dryer lint. It is a serious fire hazard if you don't clean it out of your dryer, but it helps a lot to start a fire when you want one. The suggestion for use of the dryer lint was to put it in a ziploc bag to make sure it stays dry. If you want to use unravelled twine with the dryer lint, you could put the twine in the ziploc bag also.


Dryer does not require much preparation and it is free as well. I like the idea of dryer lint as a survival tool also.


The three things he says are necessary for a fire are,   tinder, kindling and logs. He suggests you use twice as much of each as you think you will actually need. The smallest is tinder and that is used at the beginning of a fire to get it started. That would be the dryer lint and you would also include the unravelled twine or wood shavings. 


The kindling is what you get started burning after the tinder. It is small pieces of wood like twigs and small sticks. A teepee shape is commonly used to get your fire going with the tinder in the center, the kindling around that and then logs around the outside. You will need to practice to get this to work. I hope that you will start this as soon as possible. It is hard to predict when the next disaster will happen in your area.