2nd one is defo real..remember seeing a video in general studies about nuclear bombs and how they got US servicemen at different distances from the blast to dig themselves in whilst they set off a nuke so they could test the effects
yup, in the first nuclear tests alot of scientists died becuase of standing too close and hanging around afterwards
Yeah there's two shock waves. The first is a sonic blast travelling away from ground zero at 340(ish) m/s, and the second is a wind caused by the rapidly expanding air. It's hot, and if you've seen the footage of a blast you'll see that it incinerates trees and houses and stuff. Scary! Weird thing is the wind goes away from the blast, then reverses and theres a wind towards the blast as the mushroom cloud starts to form and rise - air is 'sucked in' to replace the rising hot air. There's also the underground shockwave which is the fastest of all, travelling at 1000+ m/s (sound travels much faster in rock). Problem for the poor suckers in the second photo is that they were probably already condemned to a slow and painful death of radiation poisoning before they even felt a shockwave - a massive gamma blast travels out at the speed of light at the instant of detonation. Poor b*****ds thought sunglasses would protect them...
Gamma radiation would most likely pass straight through a human doing little to no damage. Beta radiation is the most dangerous if exposed externally as it can penetrate far enough into the body to do some serious damage to vital organs, where as alpha can barely penetrate the first few layers of skin. However, particles emitting alpha radiation are the most dangerous if ingested or inhaled as all of this radiation will be absorbed by the lining of the digestive/respiratory tracts. The russian TSAR bomb detonated in 61 (the one everyone knows of, as being the biggest bomb ever) was also the cleanest. 97% of it's ebergy was derived from fusion reactions rather than the much less clean fission reaction. However, the Bomb itself was designed to have a 100megaton yield, but the third stage was replaced with lead for the test, hence the much cleaner explosion, even though this meant the yeild was dropped to 57megatons. Had the TSAR been detonated at it's full capacity, that bomb alone would have increased atmospheric fallout due to ALL previous test detonations worldwide by 25%. In other words, the fallout from that bomb alone would have been equivalent to a quarter of ALL the bombs detonated up to that point. Scary huh? 8-ball
All true. Indeed it is alpha and beta that cause the majority of the fallout from a nuclear detonation. But it is the instantaneous exposure to a massive gamma blast that affects those at ground zero IIRC - most of the gamma passes harmlessly through the body, but some inevitably hits the DNA
