What if a nuke landed in your city?

At the moment there are over 12,500 nuclear warheads ready to be used, and the threat of a nuclear war is at its highest point ever. To get an understanding of what a nuclear bomb can really do, I have summarised what it would be like if a nuke where to be detonated in a city.

Phase 1

The first phase of the explosion would happen within one second. On the launch site a ball of plasma hotter than a sun would appear and would grow to about 2 kilometers in diameter, if you were within this radius, you would be incinerated. It doesn't matter if it is a building or a trash can everything would be wiped out like water to a very hot pan. At the same time a flash of light would beam across the city, if you were unfortunate enough to have looked at it, you would be blind. The heat from the light would render to across 13 kilometers, meaning that anything in this radius would burst into flames.

Phase 2

This would happen in matter of seconds, meaning many people would have already died by now. The flash is then followed up by a shockwave of superheated and super compressed air which would be bubbling up and and expanding faster than the speed of sound. It would create hurricanes, brutal winds and tornadoes. Everything within 175 square kilometres would collapse like a deck of cards.

A mushroom cloud made by the remains of dust and ash from all of the detonated debri would cast over the city.

Phase 3

This will begin in the coming hours and days, there are hundreds of thousands/ millions of people with severe injuries, broken bones,burns or lacerations who will not be provided with any medical and emergency help due to everything being completely obliterated.

This will cause thousands more to die. People would be trapped under debris like in earthquakes or unable to escape the city due to the impassable amount of debris.

Radiation rain will begin to pour down and every breath is poisonous to the survivors, many will die of radiation exposure over the coming days.

Help from other cities would have a hard time entering the disaster zone as well as being it being risky ro enter an area with such high levels of radiation.

The hospitals in the neighboring cities would also be unequipped for a disaster of this scale and would be overwhelmed with all the injuries.

Although reading and researching about this was very interesting, it baffles me that we have created something with so much power and so much might, its estimated that it would only take 100 nukes to wipe out humanity, when you put it into account that we already have 13,000 nukes ready to go, it can make the aspect of nukes even more detrimental.

An application made by Alex Wellers lets you virtually drop a bomb anywhere in the world and you can select the bomb to see the extent of the damage.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Noor Munawar