On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote: > It's hardly implausible to believe I might survive a 1 kiloton nuclear > blast, about what the "Davy Crockett" U.S. nuke, at around 50 lbs,
The design of current glass-tower skyscrapers encourages glass fragment blowthrough by the shockwave, which will result in massive injuries (simulated on pigs in wind tunnels it abraded flesh to the bone in seconds, it would certainly kill you by blood loss or at least maim badly). It is very worthwhile to establish a duck and cover instinct at the first signs of the flash. It will minimize flash blindness/prevent holes in retina/skin burns as well as minimize the impact of debris and exposure to the shockwave. Getting out of the potentially developing firestorm (unlikely in a small yield weapon) in the panic stampede while minimizing exposure to fallout is much less constrained than right reflexes in the first second or so. If you're paranoid, a small cheap terror kit stored in office/car trunk/home could considerably enhance your survival chances, and minimize subsequent health risk. Actually it would be fun to assemble an item list for a kit. > provided. It makes sense to think that Soviet suitcase nukes have a > similar yield. Suitcase nukes missing (the only weapons without PAL codes/PAL codes issued to people in charge of them, all other weapons won't assemble without PAL encoding the assembly timing) are apparently a canard. In any case, these are are high-maintenance weapons, and no by now no longer operable/only capable of a fizzle, so only useful for salvaging the fissibles. Latter could be easily leached by purex process from black market low-ashes fuel (high-ashes fuel is much hotter and has the wrong Pu isotopes, so you'll get a hotter core with higher background neutron flux which will make it go off before full assembly can occur, thus seriously reducing yield). > The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were closer to 12-23 kilotons, > according to one source (http://www.danford.net/hiroshim.htm), and > there supposedly was a 50 percent survival rate at 1/8 of a mile from > ground zero -- while the bomb went off above ground as opposed to on the > ground. If you pressize the weapon pit with 3-5 g gaseous tritium few seconds (Pu metal rapidly forms hydrides) before assembly the yield could be significantly higher (50 kT?), while still not being a fusion weapon which requires considerably more geometry and timing magic to work (the yield boost is from the fusion neutrons synergy fissioning more material during inertial confinement).
