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An air burst or airburst is the detonation of an explosive device such as an anti-personnel artillery shell or a nuclear weapon in the air instead of on contact with the ground or target. The principal military advantage of an air burst over a ground burst is that the energy from the explosion, including any shell fragments , is distributed ...
A soil earth medium favors base surge formation in an underground burst. Although the base surge typically contains only about 10% of the total bomb debris in a subsurface burst, it can create larger radiation doses than fallout near the detonation, because it arrives sooner than fallout, before much radioactive decay has occurred.
Since the E1 component of nuclear EMP depends on the prompt gamma-ray output, which was only 0.1% of yield in Starfish Prime but can be 0.5% of yield in low-yield pure nuclear fission weapons, a 10 kt (42 TJ) bomb can easily be 5 * 8%= 40% as powerful as the 1.44 Mt (6.0 PJ) Starfish Prime at producing EMP.
Calculations demonstrate that one megaton of fission, typical of a two-megaton H-bomb, will create enough beta radiation to blackout an area 400 kilometres (250 miles) across for five minutes. Careful selection of the burst altitudes and locations can produce an extremely effective radar-blanking effect. [20]
So the same burst at 50,000 feet (15,000 m) will be at a pressure of about 0.1 atmospheres, resulting in a fireball on the order of 2,150 metres (7,050 ft) in diameter, about twice the size of one near the ground. For a high altitude burst, say 250,000 feet (76 km), the fireball will expand to about 46 kilometres (29 mi) in diameter. [4]
The human body can survive relatively high blast overpressure without experiencing barotrauma. A 5 psi blast overpressure will rupture eardrums in about 1% of subjects, and a 45 psi overpressure will cause eardrum rupture in about 99% of all subjects. The threshold for lung damage occurs at about 15 psi blast overpressure.
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.
Explosion of unserviceable ammunition and other military items The explosion of the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb. An explosion is a rapid expansion in volume of a given amount of matter associated with an extreme outward release of energy, usually with the generation of high temperatures and release of high-pressure gases. Explosions may also be ...