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Intense thermal radiation at the hypocenter forms a nuclear fireball which, if the explosion is low enough in altitude, is often associated with a mushroom cloud. In a high-altitude burst where the density of the atmosphere is low, more energy is released as ionizing gamma radiation and X-rays than as an atmosphere-displacing shockwave.
These materials let off nuclear radiation in the form of residual radiation. [8] In the event of a nuclear attack, a human body can be irradiated by at least three processes. The first, and most significant, cause of burns is thermal radiation and not caused by ionizing radiation. Thermal burns from infrared heat radiation, these would be the ...
This U.S. design was the heavy but highly efficient (i.e., nuclear weapon yield per unit bomb weight) 25 Mt (100 PJ) B41 nuclear bomb. [21] The Soviet Union is thought to have used multiple stages (including more than one tertiary fusion stage) in their 50 Mt (210 PJ) (100 Mt (420 PJ) in intended use) Tsar Bomba.
A government safety expert says its entirely possible to survive a nuclear explosion and its aftereffects. ... though thermal radiation can last several seconds and inflict severe burns miles from ...
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
Log–log plot comparing the yield (in kilotonnes) and mass (in kilograms) of various nuclear weapons developed by the United States.. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy released such as blast, thermal, and nuclear radiation, when that particular nuclear weapon is detonated, usually expressed as a TNT equivalent (the standardized equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene ...
Compared to a pure fission bomb with an identical explosive yield, a neutron bomb would emit about ten times [9] the amount of neutron radiation. In a fission bomb, at sea level, the total radiation pulse energy which is composed of both gamma rays and neutrons is approximately 5% of the entire energy released; in neutron bombs, it would be ...
A nuclear weapon [a] is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion.