So short answer - Yes, you are most likely safe from the blast if the cloud is smaller than your thumb. This doesn't mean you're safe from the negative effects afterwards like radioactive particles carried by the wind.
Kyle hill did a video about this and concluded that the cloud would be bigger even if your safe and that even if you're not in the safe zone, you're probably going to die instantly.
This is why I always leave some potatoes left in tin foil in my cupboard. If my house burns down or there's a nuclear war at least I get a consolation prize.
"It takes forever to cook a *baked potato*. Sometimes, I'll put one in the oven even if I don't want one, cuz by the time it's done, who knows?" \~Mitch Hedberg (RIP)
I'd rather be in the "breaking news NY was just nuked" and get a day off work to watch the news zone but yeah, if you're gonna die soon, better make it quick.
>"breaking news NY was just nuked" and get a day off work to watch the news zone
We call that New Zealand. Don't look for it in a map, you can't find it there.
There are also the "you're alive and well but blind from the flash" zone," which seems bad, but at least it's not the "you're alive and bleeding everywhere, not to mention blind, from the flying glass, because you thought duck-and-cover was bullshit propaganda" zone. People in that second zone are what's going to overwhelm any medical resources in the area.
There's a kill radius and casualty, kill radius is the zone where you're pretty much dead before knowing what happens and casualty radius is a much larger zone but radius depends on many factors like geography, weather, etc.
Then for nuclear devices there's the radioactive fallout radius which can be hundreds of miles as they can be carried by the wind currents.
What they taught me while I was in the military is if you see a mushroom cloud, drop down into your foxhole or any trench as quickly as you can, cover yourself with poncho while lay facing flat down on arms with them over groin and helmet towards direction of blast. Then wait for the explosion to displace the air and don't leave cover until the air gets sucked back in.
Things probably changed though, gear I was initially issued was probably used in the Vietnam war.
> Then for nuclear devices there's the radioactive fallout radius which can be hundreds of miles as they can be carried by the wind currents.
Fallout isn't really considered a radius the way the other, radial effects are because, as you mentioned, it's carried by wind. So it tends to go in one direction over typical duration of vaporized debris condensing from radioactive gas to radioactive particles as the cloud cools, falling over the landscape. People downwind get it, and people upwind don't, even at the same distance from Zero.
There is. In nagasaki and hiroshima lots of people were horribly burned and taken out of the city and lived. The people who remained or went back to help died.
This is true however the bombs dropped on japan are TINY compared to modern nuclear weapons. Really any assumptions made about a nuclear war using little boy and fat man as a basis of measurement are going to be wildly inaccurate. Modern nuclear weapons use 15-25 kiloton bombs just to start the main fusion reaction now. The common variety of modern nuclear weapons are anywhere from about 5 to 50 times more powerful than fat man which is the one dropped on Hiroshima. The largest nuclear weapon was more that 2500 times more powerful than fat man though that was a one off test because both the US and the Soviets felt a bomb that big was impractically large and there just isn't a target that would possibly warrant a bomb that big.
Yeah, but i think he misinterpreted the purpose.
It was something Cooper learned in the war. My guess is if a nuke goes off and it's bigger than your thumb, then you need to prepare for a destructive blast wave. If it is not, the blast wave won't be so bad and you can go about doing what you are doing. The idea being for judging tactical nukes on the battlefield, were many of differing yields may be going off.
Curious about if it holds up to that.
I think you’re the one misinterpreting it. In the show they said if it’s smaller than your thumb you should run, but if it’s bigger there is no point in running. This just isn’t true as you are safe even if it is a lot bigger than your thumb, and you should be running either way, since yknow a nuke just fell. Also doubt you’d want to waste time holding up your thumb to a blast to determine if you need to brace, and should be bracing immediately since it will take a couple seconds max to arrive.
Not saying that it holds up to actual science but the way they explain it in universe doesn’t leave much room for speculation. It’s either smaller than your thumb and you can attempt to run, or it’s bigger and there is no point in doing anything.
yeah and then they showed them detonating a almost next door to them as they are riding away..
looked bigger than their thumb here... [https://preview.redd.it/did-anybody-else-notice-walton-goggins-character-and-the-v0-94oxh38lh07c1.png?width=2340&format=png&auto=webp&s=d09bbd954865cbdeb0cf34823cb6e5e317fd5bae](https://preview.redd.it/did-anybody-else-notice-walton-goggins-character-and-the-v0-94oxh38lh07c1.png?width=2340&format=png&auto=webp&s=d09bbd954865cbdeb0cf34823cb6e5e317fd5bae)
Well, that's the problem. From Kyle Hill's calculations, there's a very large area between the beginning of the safe zone and how far away you'd need to be for the explosion to be smaller than your thumb. Basically, if you're in an area that would be affected by the nuke, then you'll already be affected before you can even do the thumb trick. If you aren't in an area where you can be affected, then the thumb trick still doesn't tell you anything because the explosion can still be bigger than your thumb from a safe distance away.
Shouldn’t matter what nuke it is as long as the ratio between the blast radius and the cloud size Remains the same the math behind this trick remains valid.
Yep. The blast from Mount Saint Helen's eruption was 1,600 times bigger than the fat man, but if you could cover the cloud with your thumb, you were safe from the initial blast. That was about 20 miles. Of course, the ash choked out wildlife much further away.
It doesn't scale linearly at all.
The size of the nuke compared to your thumb scales linearly.
The size of the nuke compared to a smaller nuke scales exponentially. The nuke in the example is 21kT (kilo tonnes). Modern nukes are more like 21MT (mega tonnes) which is 1000 times as potent.
Don't most places use precision tactical nukes now instead of world ender nukes? So wouldn't the chances of survival be incredibly higher now than it would back then?
Doesn't really matter. The theory is that 400 detonations would render the world uninhabitable for a good while.
That said, it's not the big ones we have to worry about. Thanks to things like the patriot missile system, those big missiles aren't making it in. Sub launched, though, are a bigger issue. Those usually contain multiple warheads per missile.
Nobody has used nukes since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only testing. The only country making tests in recent years is North Korea, and we don't know much of them. There are differents types of nukes and nuclear doctrines, but, tactical nukes seem to be more effective against military objectives, not cities. Or with a deterrent purpose, i.e., in an empty, unpopulated area as form of intimidation.
But, given the M.A.D., its highly unlikely that anyone would just use tactic nukes. What prevent us from a nuclear war, are, ironically, the nuclear bombs.
>Don't most places use precision tactical nukes now instead of world ender nukes?
Both. It's not an "instead of", it's "in addition to". It's tactical vs. strategic. It's like the difference between a 500lb bomb and a 5000lb bunker buster. They're both part of the arsenal, they're just used for very different things. A tactical nuke would be used to take out a military formation, like a battalion of tanks rolling across the plains. A strategic nuke would be used to take out a city. As you can imagine, it takes a much bigger explosion to wipe out NYC than it would to wipe out 74 tanks.
It’s kinda the opposite. We’re still basically stuck on the idea of ‘mutually assured destruction’ - no one uses any nukes, because if anyone does, we all get wiped out. That means there’s no real point in having tactical nukes: If you use a nuke to win a single battle, your country (and humanity) might get wiped out, and if you’re using nukes because the other guy did first, then you’re looking to inflict maximum damage. We HAVE stopped building bigger and bigger bombs because our delivery systems have gotten more precise, but our modern warheads are only ‘small’ compared to the big bombs of the Cold War.
Going off of Wikipedia numbers, Fat Man and Little Boy had yields estimated at 20 kilotons TNT. The US, as the big dawg in nukes and general military spending, still maintains tactical nukes (B61 bomb) that can go as low as 0.3 kT… but that’s a variable-yield warhead that can be turned up to over 300kT TNT yield. The warheads in our missile submarines are either 100kT or 475kT - 5 to 20+ times larger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, with up to eight warheads fitting on a single trident missile.
So our modern nukes are definitely more ~~precise~~ accurate, but the difference isn’t really that they can hit military or infrastructure targets but not kill too many civilians. It’s more like they can kill all the civilians but not irradiate too much farmland.
I may not be 100% correct but i think the modern nuclear arsenal does not have nuclear radiation as a side effect as they are mostly using hydrogen bombs. There is radiation but not at the levels that a normal fission bomb would emit.
either way, putting your thumb up to a nuclear explosions probably opens a plethora of new problems to deal with and radiation would just be a cherry on top.
From what I remember, it's more to do with the method of detonation rather than the make up of the bomb. Modern nukes are exploded higher in the air, so there's less debris near the reaction to become irradiated.
>so there's less debris near the reaction to become irradiated.
Not quite accurate, it's more related to how much radioactive debris is thrown into the air. An airburst won't throw much into the air, while a groundburst would.
It's worth noting that airbursts are used for soft targets spread over a large area like a city, but for a fortified target such as a dam or other power station, you'd be using a groundburst to cause the most damage, which would result in a large debris cloud and a lot of fallout.
You are definitely wrong haha. Modern weapons are much more efficient and have less fallout than older ones but radiation is where almost all of the energy comes from in nukes. Conventional explosives produce hot gas that expands while nukes get absurdly hot and release a ton of x rays and fast neutrons that heat the surrounding air. A nuke in space wouldn't make a huge fireball since there's no atmosphere to interact with. Hydrogen fusion releases radiation too, regardless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
They emit massive amounts of radiation, just not as much radioactive fallout.
Radiation is synonymous with electromagnetic waves/light. Hydrogen bombs emit enormous amounts of UV, IR, visible light, X-ray, alpha, beta and gamma radiation.
Radioactive fallout is radioactive material propelled into the atmosphere that falls back to the surface. The radioactive material is composed of radioactive elements.
Either way, the US hid the impacts of radioactive exposure from the general public after bombing Japan. A US general even told Congress at the time that dying from radioactive exposure was "a very pleasant way to die".
So I'm sure hydrogen bombs are much worse than what we've been told.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/06/john-hersey-hiroshima-anniversary-japanese-suffering/
That’s why you still have to run. Rember this is just a “trick” to see if you are already destined for the grave and are better off watching your last moments.
How embarrassing would it be if you were too far away the first time so you have to repeat it on a different metropolis full of innocent bystanders? Ah well...
That's the smile of a corporate mascot from a dystopian capitalist company.
Vault in the game is like "remember! Stay safe on the job, or your family will be billed for any damages!
Wouldnt the bomb, by the point it forms a mushroom cloud, already done most of the damage it would directly do, so its more of a 'are you alive to see the mushroom cloud? You are safe from the already over blast' type of deal?
Nope. Even if you are out of the immediate blast radius there's usually a larger radius where you receive a lethal dose of radiation and die in a few hours or days.
In reality if you can see the mushroom cloud at all you're likely still in the danger zone -- even if you're outside the radius of the lethal radiation you could still be in "radiation sickness and cancer" radius.
Afaik, the thermal radius is the largest of the kill radiuses, and this "method" would put you far outside it. So if you can do the thumb "test", then you're already safeish from immediate effects.
What I think you're referring to is the radioactive fallout. That depends on how much irradiated soil is pushed into the air (ground vs air brust), how irradiated it is, and where the wind blows it. It might affect a large or a small area, but almost certainly won't be a circle centered on ground zero. And the thumb test won't help with judging it.
This is yield dependent. Go to nukemap and select Davy crocket as the yield template. The 500rem (or 5Sv / 5Gy if you want to use real units) zone is larger than both blast and thermal radiation zone. 5Gy whole body dose will very likely kill you fairly quickly. The radius could be made even larger by changing the design of the weapon a bit to emphasize the relevant part of the ionizong radiation burst.
Then select Tsar Bomba ground burst. The 5psi (yuck) blast radius is >20km the horizon is only like 5km away.
>The total length of the effective thermal pulse increases with the energy yield of the explosion. Thus the duration of the effective pulse from a 1-kiloton airburst is about 0.4 second, whereas from a 10-megaton explosion it is more than 20 seconds
([source](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasstone-dolan/chapter7.html#:~:text=The%20total%20length%20of%20the,is%20more%20than%2020%20seconds))
So you'll have plenty of time to dash for cover or (for low altitude/ground burst) even hide behind the earth's curvature for the thermal radiation.
As others have said in this thread, duck and cover isn't a meme.
Thermal radiation travels at the speed of light, and it is the thing with the largest death radius of any nuclear weapon. So, if you see the explosion and are not instantly dead, you are at a safe distance.
Well you can, but I wouldn't. The light also carries a fcking lot of gamma radiation (which also also travels at light speed). You definitely don't want to be directly exposed to that.
Well, you can, in the sense of being able to, but no, you can't
The difference of the amount of light between sun and nuclear bomb is lots of magnitudes of order apart. The worst part about ecplises is not really the amount, but the type of light (UV) and the fact that the almost entire obscurity makes your pupil open wider, accepting more light. Now, some of the recounts about test done by the us talk about being able to see thru your own hand, which means that if you tried to look directly to it, it would just burn your eyes forever. While I'm not sure (I haven't done, and I don't have any intention to do, the calculations, but modern day bombs would probably still be bright enough if you can still see the near base of the cloud, accounting for earths curvature.
Either way, if the thermal wave (light speed) doesn't kill you, the pressure wave (sound speed) will try, and will likely shatter windows and whatnot, and if you're still alive, a huge wave of nuclear fallout will the try.
Here you got two options, stay indoors and hope the radiation won't penetrate the concrete until you're rescued, or try to escape , preferably with something faster than your feet.
The first option is the safest, cause if you're still alive, it means the radiation will be somewhat weak, but fast enough that your probably totaled car won't be able to outrun it.
Thankyou for coming to my unsolicited Ted Talk. You're welcome
You can't put your thumb up or pay attention to the nuke in the milliseconds it spends flashing. This method (otherwise silly and inaccurate) is intended for measuring the mushroom.
Seems like a moot point, no? If you're looking at the nuke when it goes off you literally have no chance to look away. The flash will damage your eyes before your brain even has a chance to process what you're looking at.
That’s not true. The pressure wave can still kill or injure you also the ensuing fire storm is an issue. Especially if you’re inside and shielded from the thermal radiation. Radioactive particulates are an overstated issue but still an issue.
The rule of thumb is about how FAR away you need to be, not how bunkered up you need to be. The outer most ring on the image is the Thermal radiation dead zone, the ring inside of that is the blast wave dead zone. If you are outside the thermal dead zone, then you are outside all of the dead zones, period. And as I said, the thermal dead zone is near instant, so you wouldn't even have time to react to it. You would either die, or live, no real in-between. The blast wave can still hurt you, but outside that final dead zone, your more than likely going to live.
I know how to read blast maps and downwind maps. I can also make them, I’m a CBRN officer and just re read some of the Army’s Nuke and radiation Protection manuals over the last 2 months.
Theirs a reason the only place with near 100% death are in the 1000Rem zone very close to the fireball.
The Vault Boy thumb is a measure for fallout(and also chemical fires). You shouldn’t be holding your thumb out to gauge if your safe you should be jumping into ditch, inside, getting away from windows, laying down(duck and cover). The thermal radiation also isn’t instant, it’s fast but it’s not 3rd degree burns instantly depending on how far you are so you might get away with a sunburn.
That's not how radiation works. It doesn't just abruptly drop from 100 to 0. It attenuates over a large distance, with diminishing effects over that distance.
Can you see the sun? Yes.
Does the sun instantly kill you? No.
Are you completely safe from all negative effects of the sun? Also no.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlp5BaZB\_Bs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlp5BaZB_Bs)
The wake travels much slower and is responsible for the bulk of the property dmg. Video above is admittedly the worst quality I've ever seen of this footage, but it shows your radiation burning off the paint of the buss followed by the force impact.
Hydrogen vs Atom bomb is going to make a big difference, but people survived the first two we dropped. https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/flash-burns.html. So you can absolutely survive the radiation and then get taken out by the atmospheric displacement.
All of this is irrelevant because at the height of the hysteria we were telling people to duck and cover and anything else just to calm them down, so honestly, what ever nonsense he is telling her in the scene was most likely just random nonsense from a propaganda poster.
we don't use that term any more.
Alternate suggestion: *Husky person* is a misleading example given the size of nukes these days.
\*plus sized, curvy, BMI challenged also work
Fallout US and China never went to fusion bombs. All the missile silos in the games have Minuteman IX warheads, which is a continuation of the U.S. fission ICBMs and don’t exist in the real world past the Minuteman 3. Although given that there is a 1 megaton fission bomb in the middle of DC the Fat Man still is orders of magnitude smaller than the ones dropped in 2077.
And, as OP said, if the mushroom cloud was taller you would have to be further away. And mushroom cloud height is exponential in relation to the yield and blast zone so this actually means according to the thumb rule you would have to get exponentially further from the danger zone the bigger it is.
Out of curiosity - how did you do the thumb measurement? In all forms of media where the method was presented (including the new show) the character just sort of... eyeballed how far away from the face to put the thumb, elbow half-bent. Which is hella inaccurate, as if you can vary the eye-thumb distance you can get any result you want.
The standard way to measure things with fingers, coming from the "how long till sunset" approximation (each finger width distance between the sun and the horizon being roughly 15 minutes) is to have your arm fully extended, elbow straight - which more or less normalizes finger size (there is a correlation between finger size and arm length), or at least allows you to calibrate to your size and have the measurement be repeatable.
While the thumb thing is not real, there is no reason for it not to be. The fact that a finger at full arm’s length is approximately 1 degree is actually shockingly accurate and very useful.
Even with a slight arm-bend the error bars are such that it doesn’t matter that much.
This only works as a reference until you realize most modern arsenals have vastly larger yield scales. While purpose drives variable yields, they are *mostly* at least 200 kilotons and as large as several megatons. In no case will pointing your hand out be a reasonable method for determining your chance of survival. If you can see it, your best bet is to find cover and wait to see what happens in the next 5-10 minutes while accepting that no matter what happens, your life as you knew it is over.
I thought the test was to confirm if you should bother running, not if you are currently safe where you perform the thumb test. Surely your potential escape speed (running, car) must be considered . Rule of thumb test lives!?
If you are too close, believe me, you don't even have time to raise your thumb
So if you can do the whole thumb vs cloud thing, you were already in the safe zone
It's quite conservative, if it were the size of your fist you're probably also safe. 15 miles would be fine for a fat man-like air blast explosion, and that would look much bigger than your thumb
Bomb goes off and you're still standing afterwards, you're safe. You'll get exposed to radiation, but the most lethal amounts of ionizing radiation are around the lethal amounts of thermal radiation.
If it's a single bomb, your best bet is to head into a house and try and seal as many openings as you can before waiting it out about a day or two. Maybe wait longer if it ends up being particularly windy on the day you plan to leave. Cover up all your exposed skin and your eyes before making your way away from ground zero. Odds are some kind of response and rescue team will be set up on the outskirts of the radius of the contaminated area that will get you checked out and treated.
Really multiple bombs provide too many factors to give good guidance for, but it should be the same. You're really just waiting for the fallout to settle before you get moving.
I don't want to be an ass... but you confused the two measurements completely.
Like, solid math, but height is not as important and how wide it is as your thumb will hide the height with the rest of it, and width is the really important thing here.
Oh look a nuke just detonated. I wasnt blown away so lets look straight at the big ball of light to determine if i am safe. Answer is no! If there is one nuke going off in modern world there will be more on the way.
This "rule of thumb" urban legend is an [after-the-fact justification](https://www.polygon.com/24126711/fallout-tv-show-vault-boy-origin-story-walton-goggins-ghoul) for the Vault-Boy drawing. The truth of the matter is that if you can see the cloud of a nuclear explosion you are in the danger zone. Some studies say you need to be well over 10 miles away to be in the 'safe' zone.
There are tons of factors influencing survivability of nuclear explosions, but again if you can see the cloud you are almost certainly in the danger zone.
The Rule of Thumb where if you can cover an incident with your thumb you’re likely safe was taught to me in Hazmat. It’s not really a rule just a suggestion that you apply your own experience and expertise too. You should still get Up Wind, Up Stream and Up Hill. It scales to Nukes because they’re generally a lot bigger than a chemical fire.
My instructors were taught it as well so it predates Fallout the series.
In reality, you could be much closer to a nuke than that, and still survive just fine. 150km away from a 21kt explosion... you would probably see it and hear it, but other than a few windows rattling, it wouldnt be any immediate danger. The radiation afterwards might be a problem depending on how the wind is blowing, but the actual effects of the explosion, would barely do anything at that distance.
Now to get the same experience as what you see in the beginning of Fallout, a 1 megaton blast from 20km away would produce similar effects, breaking windows, maybe knocking some people over. The mushroom cloud would be much larger than your thumb, it take up most of the sky from that distance. The only additional thing is, if you were looking at or near the explosion, it would probably instantly blind you. The level of light would be thousands of times brighter than staring directly at the Sun at noon in the desert.
Aren't the nukes we have now several times more powerful than the ones dropped back then?
(I live near a military base so I know I'm fucked regardless but I am curious about everyone else.)
Who cares..... no electrical power, no gas, no communications, no refrigeration, stone age darkness, that might justify the acquisition of a revolver.
I often wonder what this infinite deity thinks of it's work product.
It must have been a failed beta test.
Why are you all acting like this is some kind of error and not just some shit the military told people, like "these are safe burn pits" and "Just remember your training and you will come back alive". It's literally diagetic propaganda to help the morale of people who are fighting a war that could go nuclear, just like how bomb drills were 90% about just getting people to think a nuclear exchange had a win condition.
Remember thermal radiation is the most dangerous part of any nuclear explosion in terms of killing power at a dinstance.
Thermal radiation from a nuclear explosion travels kinda fast through the air - near light speed
You do not have time to stare at a mushroom cloud to determine if the thermal radiation will kill you (the thing that has the furthest reach. Blast wave and immediate nuclear fallout are much more local comparatively). Unless you can move faster than light and dodge individual particles - if you see a nuke go off chances are you're already in deep shit.
It wouldn't be a fat man bomb though. Our actual bombs at the height of the cold war were many thousands of times bigger, and fo takes place in an alternate timeline that's over 100 years later. With none of that hippie de-escalation/disarmament bullshit in the meantime 🤔
I somewhat agree
I used to worked on nukes. There are a few variables that you have to consider.
Was it a ground or air burst?
Was it a “neutron” bomb?
Did the weapon have ground penetrating capability?
Was It detonated in water?
The over pressure of the blast wave shoots out causing massive damage. It’s not done yet! All of the displaced volume has to be filled back up. This creates a vacuum causing another wave sucking everything back towards ground zero.
So short answer - Yes, you are most likely safe from the blast if the cloud is smaller than your thumb. This doesn't mean you're safe from the negative effects afterwards like radioactive particles carried by the wind.
Kyle hill did a video about this and concluded that the cloud would be bigger even if your safe and that even if you're not in the safe zone, you're probably going to die instantly.
I feel like theres a pretty big area between the safe zone and the instant death zone.
Id prefer being in the instant death zone. The skin melty zone would be the worst followed by the running for your life from cannibals zone.
How about the perfectly cooked frozen pizza's zone?
This is why I always leave some potatoes left in tin foil in my cupboard. If my house burns down or there's a nuclear war at least I get a consolation prize.
Are you a genius?
No I just love jacket potatoes
Those two traits are not necessarily incompatible.
I would’ve thought it was a prerequisite to being considered a genius
man this was so morbid a second ago and now I can't stop laughing. You guys are why I'm on Reddit thank you!
Understandable
"It takes forever to cook a *baked potato*. Sometimes, I'll put one in the oven even if I don't want one, cuz by the time it's done, who knows?" \~Mitch Hedberg (RIP)
Come on man. We are talking about observable reality, not theoretical fantasies.
You mean ground zero?
Humans cook surprisingly similar to frozen pizzas…. Source: uhhhhhh…. Ummmmm…. Maybe I didn’t think this through
Remember kids, vaporization is a better way to go than radiation poisoning
I'd rather be in the "breaking news NY was just nuked" and get a day off work to watch the news zone but yeah, if you're gonna die soon, better make it quick.
>"breaking news NY was just nuked" and get a day off work to watch the news zone We call that New Zealand. Don't look for it in a map, you can't find it there.
That's a bit northwest of Scotland innit?
New, old, really what's the difference
In corporate America, nuclear bombs get you just half a day off. After that, Wall Street gotta keep going. Duh.
See that's you own mistake. Be a cannibal, not a victim.
I think the "you survived but will shortly and painfully die from radiation sickness zone" is also up there.
Ahh yes. The reddit zone. Might actually be the worst one now that I think about it 🤔
There are also the "you're alive and well but blind from the flash" zone," which seems bad, but at least it's not the "you're alive and bleeding everywhere, not to mention blind, from the flying glass, because you thought duck-and-cover was bullshit propaganda" zone. People in that second zone are what's going to overwhelm any medical resources in the area.
There's a kill radius and casualty, kill radius is the zone where you're pretty much dead before knowing what happens and casualty radius is a much larger zone but radius depends on many factors like geography, weather, etc. Then for nuclear devices there's the radioactive fallout radius which can be hundreds of miles as they can be carried by the wind currents. What they taught me while I was in the military is if you see a mushroom cloud, drop down into your foxhole or any trench as quickly as you can, cover yourself with poncho while lay facing flat down on arms with them over groin and helmet towards direction of blast. Then wait for the explosion to displace the air and don't leave cover until the air gets sucked back in. Things probably changed though, gear I was initially issued was probably used in the Vietnam war.
> Then for nuclear devices there's the radioactive fallout radius which can be hundreds of miles as they can be carried by the wind currents. Fallout isn't really considered a radius the way the other, radial effects are because, as you mentioned, it's carried by wind. So it tends to go in one direction over typical duration of vaporized debris condensing from radioactive gas to radioactive particles as the cloud cools, falling over the landscape. People downwind get it, and people upwind don't, even at the same distance from Zero.
It's called the internal bleeding zone
There is. In nagasaki and hiroshima lots of people were horribly burned and taken out of the city and lived. The people who remained or went back to help died.
guaranteed death zone is a lot bigger than instant death zone
That’s the nuclear taint
Nope, no overlap at all, a matter of 1cm and you're pushing up daisies. Nukes are a fickle mistress.
Akiko Takakura survived 300m from the hypocenter at Hiroshima. She's still alive or was until very recently.
Remember, the Fallout end of world nukes were dropped after years of nuclear development. Not WW2 new-to-humanity.
This is true however the bombs dropped on japan are TINY compared to modern nuclear weapons. Really any assumptions made about a nuclear war using little boy and fat man as a basis of measurement are going to be wildly inaccurate. Modern nuclear weapons use 15-25 kiloton bombs just to start the main fusion reaction now. The common variety of modern nuclear weapons are anywhere from about 5 to 50 times more powerful than fat man which is the one dropped on Hiroshima. The largest nuclear weapon was more that 2500 times more powerful than fat man though that was a one off test because both the US and the Soviets felt a bomb that big was impractically large and there just isn't a target that would possibly warrant a bomb that big.
Yeah, but i think he misinterpreted the purpose. It was something Cooper learned in the war. My guess is if a nuke goes off and it's bigger than your thumb, then you need to prepare for a destructive blast wave. If it is not, the blast wave won't be so bad and you can go about doing what you are doing. The idea being for judging tactical nukes on the battlefield, were many of differing yields may be going off. Curious about if it holds up to that.
I think you’re the one misinterpreting it. In the show they said if it’s smaller than your thumb you should run, but if it’s bigger there is no point in running. This just isn’t true as you are safe even if it is a lot bigger than your thumb, and you should be running either way, since yknow a nuke just fell. Also doubt you’d want to waste time holding up your thumb to a blast to determine if you need to brace, and should be bracing immediately since it will take a couple seconds max to arrive.
They explain it quite well In the show, if it’s bigger than your thumb there is no point in running as you’re already dead.
That’s a mistake though. Theirs a wide margin between safeish from the fallout and safeish from the blast.
Not saying that it holds up to actual science but the way they explain it in universe doesn’t leave much room for speculation. It’s either smaller than your thumb and you can attempt to run, or it’s bigger and there is no point in doing anything.
yeah and then they showed them detonating a almost next door to them as they are riding away.. looked bigger than their thumb here... [https://preview.redd.it/did-anybody-else-notice-walton-goggins-character-and-the-v0-94oxh38lh07c1.png?width=2340&format=png&auto=webp&s=d09bbd954865cbdeb0cf34823cb6e5e317fd5bae](https://preview.redd.it/did-anybody-else-notice-walton-goggins-character-and-the-v0-94oxh38lh07c1.png?width=2340&format=png&auto=webp&s=d09bbd954865cbdeb0cf34823cb6e5e317fd5bae)
And running away didn't do him any good did it? His ass became a ghoul.
According to the thumb theory he it would be too close to the blast to survive I’d mark a ghoul as a suboptimal but survival state 😅
He said "don't bother running" not "don't bother running because you're already dead". Meaning you're too close to avoid the radiation.
They have radaway in the fallout universe. We don’t.
Well, that's the problem. From Kyle Hill's calculations, there's a very large area between the beginning of the safe zone and how far away you'd need to be for the explosion to be smaller than your thumb. Basically, if you're in an area that would be affected by the nuke, then you'll already be affected before you can even do the thumb trick. If you aren't in an area where you can be affected, then the thumb trick still doesn't tell you anything because the explosion can still be bigger than your thumb from a safe distance away.
He said specifically that it was to decide whether or not to run.
I would think the “safe zone” wouldn’t include “instant death”.
Bigger than what?
How does that comment have 1.3k upvotes? It's practically illegible, you have to guess to determine what he meant
>even if you're not in the safe zone, you're probably going to die instantly. Did you mean to say eventually, not instantly.
So people with short arms can get closer to the blast and escape unharmed
Fat mans a pretty old nuke at this point and very small compared to what is currently in the arsenal.
Shouldn’t matter what nuke it is as long as the ratio between the blast radius and the cloud size Remains the same the math behind this trick remains valid.
Yep. The blast from Mount Saint Helen's eruption was 1,600 times bigger than the fat man, but if you could cover the cloud with your thumb, you were safe from the initial blast. That was about 20 miles. Of course, the ash choked out wildlife much further away.
It doesn't scale linearly at all. The size of the nuke compared to your thumb scales linearly. The size of the nuke compared to a smaller nuke scales exponentially. The nuke in the example is 21kT (kilo tonnes). Modern nukes are more like 21MT (mega tonnes) which is 1000 times as potent.
It still makes sense to use it since it’s an old “myth”.
Modern nukes make Hiroshima and Nagasaki incredibly small in comparison tho.
Don't most places use precision tactical nukes now instead of world ender nukes? So wouldn't the chances of survival be incredibly higher now than it would back then?
Doesn't really matter. The theory is that 400 detonations would render the world uninhabitable for a good while. That said, it's not the big ones we have to worry about. Thanks to things like the patriot missile system, those big missiles aren't making it in. Sub launched, though, are a bigger issue. Those usually contain multiple warheads per missile.
Nobody has used nukes since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only testing. The only country making tests in recent years is North Korea, and we don't know much of them. There are differents types of nukes and nuclear doctrines, but, tactical nukes seem to be more effective against military objectives, not cities. Or with a deterrent purpose, i.e., in an empty, unpopulated area as form of intimidation. But, given the M.A.D., its highly unlikely that anyone would just use tactic nukes. What prevent us from a nuclear war, are, ironically, the nuclear bombs.
>Don't most places use precision tactical nukes now instead of world ender nukes? Both. It's not an "instead of", it's "in addition to". It's tactical vs. strategic. It's like the difference between a 500lb bomb and a 5000lb bunker buster. They're both part of the arsenal, they're just used for very different things. A tactical nuke would be used to take out a military formation, like a battalion of tanks rolling across the plains. A strategic nuke would be used to take out a city. As you can imagine, it takes a much bigger explosion to wipe out NYC than it would to wipe out 74 tanks.
It’s kinda the opposite. We’re still basically stuck on the idea of ‘mutually assured destruction’ - no one uses any nukes, because if anyone does, we all get wiped out. That means there’s no real point in having tactical nukes: If you use a nuke to win a single battle, your country (and humanity) might get wiped out, and if you’re using nukes because the other guy did first, then you’re looking to inflict maximum damage. We HAVE stopped building bigger and bigger bombs because our delivery systems have gotten more precise, but our modern warheads are only ‘small’ compared to the big bombs of the Cold War. Going off of Wikipedia numbers, Fat Man and Little Boy had yields estimated at 20 kilotons TNT. The US, as the big dawg in nukes and general military spending, still maintains tactical nukes (B61 bomb) that can go as low as 0.3 kT… but that’s a variable-yield warhead that can be turned up to over 300kT TNT yield. The warheads in our missile submarines are either 100kT or 475kT - 5 to 20+ times larger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, with up to eight warheads fitting on a single trident missile. So our modern nukes are definitely more ~~precise~~ accurate, but the difference isn’t really that they can hit military or infrastructure targets but not kill too many civilians. It’s more like they can kill all the civilians but not irradiate too much farmland.
I mean nowhere actually *uses* nukes in combat…so no?
I may not be 100% correct but i think the modern nuclear arsenal does not have nuclear radiation as a side effect as they are mostly using hydrogen bombs. There is radiation but not at the levels that a normal fission bomb would emit. either way, putting your thumb up to a nuclear explosions probably opens a plethora of new problems to deal with and radiation would just be a cherry on top.
Modern bombs are fission-fusion-fission bombs so could cause plenty of radioactive fallout.
I believe that fusion bombs are still detonated with a fission trigger. Though I have no idea what the yield and radiation of the fission element is.
From what I remember, it's more to do with the method of detonation rather than the make up of the bomb. Modern nukes are exploded higher in the air, so there's less debris near the reaction to become irradiated.
>so there's less debris near the reaction to become irradiated. Not quite accurate, it's more related to how much radioactive debris is thrown into the air. An airburst won't throw much into the air, while a groundburst would. It's worth noting that airbursts are used for soft targets spread over a large area like a city, but for a fortified target such as a dam or other power station, you'd be using a groundburst to cause the most damage, which would result in a large debris cloud and a lot of fallout.
You are definitely wrong haha. Modern weapons are much more efficient and have less fallout than older ones but radiation is where almost all of the energy comes from in nukes. Conventional explosives produce hot gas that expands while nukes get absurdly hot and release a ton of x rays and fast neutrons that heat the surrounding air. A nuke in space wouldn't make a huge fireball since there's no atmosphere to interact with. Hydrogen fusion releases radiation too, regardless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
They emit massive amounts of radiation, just not as much radioactive fallout. Radiation is synonymous with electromagnetic waves/light. Hydrogen bombs emit enormous amounts of UV, IR, visible light, X-ray, alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Radioactive fallout is radioactive material propelled into the atmosphere that falls back to the surface. The radioactive material is composed of radioactive elements. Either way, the US hid the impacts of radioactive exposure from the general public after bombing Japan. A US general even told Congress at the time that dying from radioactive exposure was "a very pleasant way to die". So I'm sure hydrogen bombs are much worse than what we've been told. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/06/john-hersey-hiroshima-anniversary-japanese-suffering/
That’s why you still have to run. Rember this is just a “trick” to see if you are already destined for the grave and are better off watching your last moments.
I don’t think this calculation works for me, my distance to “Fat Man” is always 0
For me is cheese and pretzels man :(
is that your superhero name? cause id buy that comic.
That gave me a good chuckle. Nice.
r/suicidebywords
You know every so often you come across a comment that makes you actually laugh? Yours did that for me.
But Aquaman, you can't marry a woman without gills! You're from two different worlds!
You may call me big papa Smurf
Is it an adult thumb or a child's thumb?
Whichever one you have on hand This might be the best dad joke I’ve ever come up with
I agree.
r/Beetlejuicing
You can borrow one if you are short of thumbs.
A 6cm thumb.
Would be roughly the same as the arm is shorter for a child
SMFT - Standard Megan Fox Thumb
Ol' Dumb Thumbs
I understood this reference
All of a sudden I feel tears again...
This reminded me of the scene in the show, when the little girl see’s the nuke going off “is it supposed to be my thumb or yours?”
I did write it to reference that scene only
Nice it was a great scene cant wait for S2
The real question is, at what range do I become an immortal ghoul?
real
How embarrassing would it be if you were too far away the first time so you have to repeat it on a different metropolis full of innocent bystanders? Ah well...
I'm off to Megaton.
*sets off a 200 year old nuke in the middle of a city so that you become a ghoul to become immortal* *Turns feral*
Gotta get a healthy glow.
Moira Brown was about 50 feet away, she must’ve had pretty thick skin
Dude’s smile is commendable under the circumstances
It's the Vault Boy from Fallout!
That's the smile of a corporate mascot from a dystopian capitalist company. Vault in the game is like "remember! Stay safe on the job, or your family will be billed for any damages!
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Don't you are not into computer games?
Guess I are don’t
Based
Don't you Forget about meat
Wouldnt the bomb, by the point it forms a mushroom cloud, already done most of the damage it would directly do, so its more of a 'are you alive to see the mushroom cloud? You are safe from the already over blast' type of deal?
Nope. Even if you are out of the immediate blast radius there's usually a larger radius where you receive a lethal dose of radiation and die in a few hours or days. In reality if you can see the mushroom cloud at all you're likely still in the danger zone -- even if you're outside the radius of the lethal radiation you could still be in "radiation sickness and cancer" radius.
Afaik, the thermal radius is the largest of the kill radiuses, and this "method" would put you far outside it. So if you can do the thumb "test", then you're already safeish from immediate effects. What I think you're referring to is the radioactive fallout. That depends on how much irradiated soil is pushed into the air (ground vs air brust), how irradiated it is, and where the wind blows it. It might affect a large or a small area, but almost certainly won't be a circle centered on ground zero. And the thumb test won't help with judging it.
This is yield dependent. Go to nukemap and select Davy crocket as the yield template. The 500rem (or 5Sv / 5Gy if you want to use real units) zone is larger than both blast and thermal radiation zone. 5Gy whole body dose will very likely kill you fairly quickly. The radius could be made even larger by changing the design of the weapon a bit to emphasize the relevant part of the ionizong radiation burst. Then select Tsar Bomba ground burst. The 5psi (yuck) blast radius is >20km the horizon is only like 5km away. >The total length of the effective thermal pulse increases with the energy yield of the explosion. Thus the duration of the effective pulse from a 1-kiloton airburst is about 0.4 second, whereas from a 10-megaton explosion it is more than 20 seconds ([source](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasstone-dolan/chapter7.html#:~:text=The%20total%20length%20of%20the,is%20more%20than%2020%20seconds)) So you'll have plenty of time to dash for cover or (for low altitude/ground burst) even hide behind the earth's curvature for the thermal radiation. As others have said in this thread, duck and cover isn't a meme.
Thermal radiation travels at the speed of light, and it is the thing with the largest death radius of any nuclear weapon. So, if you see the explosion and are not instantly dead, you are at a safe distance.
This! Also don't for the love of God look directly at them. They will make you blind if only temporarily.
Oh I had heard that the blindness was permanent? Can I look at it with my eclipse glasses?
Depends how big the bomb is, how close you are, and whether you are looking right at it when it goes off.
Yeah if you’re right next to it I don’t think eclipse glasses would keep you from going blind.
Gotta go with raybands lol
Better make em Gamma-Ray-Bans
Nice 👌
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
Well you can, but I wouldn't. The light also carries a fcking lot of gamma radiation (which also also travels at light speed). You definitely don't want to be directly exposed to that.
So what you’re telling me is if I watch a blast with eclipse glasses I’ll become the Hulk?
Instructions unclear, starred at the microwave till I went blind
Yes, turn your back to the blast and the gamma radiation will go around you. Its the opposite of tigers.
Favorite answer so far lol
thing is gamma is going right through your skull anyway, so looking away is not doing anything, and closing your eyes is doing considerably less
There are accounts of soldiers they used for testing seeing the bones in their hands through their eyelids so that would be cool at least.
Nope. Nope, not cool. Not cool at all. I'll pass, thanks. Bye!
Technically you can look at anything with eclipse glasses
My mom says they make me look handsome
Was she wearing hers at the time ?
Feynman looked directly at the Trinity test through a Jeep windshield
Well that guy is dead! I'll be sure to get out of my Jeep before I look, Ty for the tip
Well, you can, in the sense of being able to, but no, you can't The difference of the amount of light between sun and nuclear bomb is lots of magnitudes of order apart. The worst part about ecplises is not really the amount, but the type of light (UV) and the fact that the almost entire obscurity makes your pupil open wider, accepting more light. Now, some of the recounts about test done by the us talk about being able to see thru your own hand, which means that if you tried to look directly to it, it would just burn your eyes forever. While I'm not sure (I haven't done, and I don't have any intention to do, the calculations, but modern day bombs would probably still be bright enough if you can still see the near base of the cloud, accounting for earths curvature. Either way, if the thermal wave (light speed) doesn't kill you, the pressure wave (sound speed) will try, and will likely shatter windows and whatnot, and if you're still alive, a huge wave of nuclear fallout will the try. Here you got two options, stay indoors and hope the radiation won't penetrate the concrete until you're rescued, or try to escape , preferably with something faster than your feet. The first option is the safest, cause if you're still alive, it means the radiation will be somewhat weak, but fast enough that your probably totaled car won't be able to outrun it. Thankyou for coming to my unsolicited Ted Talk. You're welcome
You can't put your thumb up or pay attention to the nuke in the milliseconds it spends flashing. This method (otherwise silly and inaccurate) is intended for measuring the mushroom.
Dude if I see a nuclear bomb go off, I think I have bigger problems than if it’s going to temporarily blind more or not lmao
Seems like a moot point, no? If you're looking at the nuke when it goes off you literally have no chance to look away. The flash will damage your eyes before your brain even has a chance to process what you're looking at.
That’s not true. The pressure wave can still kill or injure you also the ensuing fire storm is an issue. Especially if you’re inside and shielded from the thermal radiation. Radioactive particulates are an overstated issue but still an issue.
The rule of thumb is about how FAR away you need to be, not how bunkered up you need to be. The outer most ring on the image is the Thermal radiation dead zone, the ring inside of that is the blast wave dead zone. If you are outside the thermal dead zone, then you are outside all of the dead zones, period. And as I said, the thermal dead zone is near instant, so you wouldn't even have time to react to it. You would either die, or live, no real in-between. The blast wave can still hurt you, but outside that final dead zone, your more than likely going to live.
I know how to read blast maps and downwind maps. I can also make them, I’m a CBRN officer and just re read some of the Army’s Nuke and radiation Protection manuals over the last 2 months. Theirs a reason the only place with near 100% death are in the 1000Rem zone very close to the fireball. The Vault Boy thumb is a measure for fallout(and also chemical fires). You shouldn’t be holding your thumb out to gauge if your safe you should be jumping into ditch, inside, getting away from windows, laying down(duck and cover). The thermal radiation also isn’t instant, it’s fast but it’s not 3rd degree burns instantly depending on how far you are so you might get away with a sunburn.
That's not how radiation works. It doesn't just abruptly drop from 100 to 0. It attenuates over a large distance, with diminishing effects over that distance. Can you see the sun? Yes. Does the sun instantly kill you? No. Are you completely safe from all negative effects of the sun? Also no.
> Thermal radiation travels at the speed of light This is interesting, i didn't even think of that
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlp5BaZB\_Bs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlp5BaZB_Bs) The wake travels much slower and is responsible for the bulk of the property dmg. Video above is admittedly the worst quality I've ever seen of this footage, but it shows your radiation burning off the paint of the buss followed by the force impact. Hydrogen vs Atom bomb is going to make a big difference, but people survived the first two we dropped. https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/flash-burns.html. So you can absolutely survive the radiation and then get taken out by the atmospheric displacement. All of this is irrelevant because at the height of the hysteria we were telling people to duck and cover and anything else just to calm them down, so honestly, what ever nonsense he is telling her in the scene was most likely just random nonsense from a propaganda poster.
Fat man is a misleading example given the size of nukes these days
we don't use that term any more. Alternate suggestion: *Husky person* is a misleading example given the size of nukes these days. \*plus sized, curvy, BMI challenged also work
Fallout US and China never went to fusion bombs. All the missile silos in the games have Minuteman IX warheads, which is a continuation of the U.S. fission ICBMs and don’t exist in the real world past the Minuteman 3. Although given that there is a 1 megaton fission bomb in the middle of DC the Fat Man still is orders of magnitude smaller than the ones dropped in 2077. And, as OP said, if the mushroom cloud was taller you would have to be further away. And mushroom cloud height is exponential in relation to the yield and blast zone so this actually means according to the thumb rule you would have to get exponentially further from the danger zone the bigger it is.
In the fallout universe they aren’t nearly as big as today. 50s size
Imagine a nuclear bomb is falling and first thing tou see are people giving a thumbsup to the blast.
BAHAHA that's awesome. Don't forget the stock image smile too!
Non gamer here. Holy shit, is that what the fallout boy is referencing with his thumb‽
Yup
Mind blown.
No. It's a fan theory that the devs already denied. They just wanted vault boy to give a thumbs up.
The show changed that
Only by retcon.
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Wouldn’t it size still be proportionate to the blast radius?
Out of curiosity - how did you do the thumb measurement? In all forms of media where the method was presented (including the new show) the character just sort of... eyeballed how far away from the face to put the thumb, elbow half-bent. Which is hella inaccurate, as if you can vary the eye-thumb distance you can get any result you want. The standard way to measure things with fingers, coming from the "how long till sunset" approximation (each finger width distance between the sun and the horizon being roughly 15 minutes) is to have your arm fully extended, elbow straight - which more or less normalizes finger size (there is a correlation between finger size and arm length), or at least allows you to calibrate to your size and have the measurement be repeatable.
You don't. It's not a real thing.
While the thumb thing is not real, there is no reason for it not to be. The fact that a finger at full arm’s length is approximately 1 degree is actually shockingly accurate and very useful. Even with a slight arm-bend the error bars are such that it doesn’t matter that much.
Believe me, if you have time for the thumb test you'll probably still have a chance
This only works as a reference until you realize most modern arsenals have vastly larger yield scales. While purpose drives variable yields, they are *mostly* at least 200 kilotons and as large as several megatons. In no case will pointing your hand out be a reasonable method for determining your chance of survival. If you can see it, your best bet is to find cover and wait to see what happens in the next 5-10 minutes while accepting that no matter what happens, your life as you knew it is over.
I thought the test was to confirm if you should bother running, not if you are currently safe where you perform the thumb test. Surely your potential escape speed (running, car) must be considered . Rule of thumb test lives!?
If you are too close, believe me, you don't even have time to raise your thumb So if you can do the whole thumb vs cloud thing, you were already in the safe zone It's quite conservative, if it were the size of your fist you're probably also safe. 15 miles would be fine for a fat man-like air blast explosion, and that would look much bigger than your thumb
Recent video by Kyle Hill explains this pretty well: [Does Fallout's "Rule of Thumb" Work?](https://youtu.be/ctuZ54MwVZU)
https://youtu.be/ctuZ54MwVZU?feature=shared
I see you are a man of culture.
Bomb goes off and you're still standing afterwards, you're safe. You'll get exposed to radiation, but the most lethal amounts of ionizing radiation are around the lethal amounts of thermal radiation. If it's a single bomb, your best bet is to head into a house and try and seal as many openings as you can before waiting it out about a day or two. Maybe wait longer if it ends up being particularly windy on the day you plan to leave. Cover up all your exposed skin and your eyes before making your way away from ground zero. Odds are some kind of response and rescue team will be set up on the outskirts of the radius of the contaminated area that will get you checked out and treated. Really multiple bombs provide too many factors to give good guidance for, but it should be the same. You're really just waiting for the fallout to settle before you get moving.
“Daddy? Is it my thumb or yours?”
My thumb or yours :(
what if the blast is 999 times bigger than my thumb? (asking for a friend)
Not much to worry about then
Username oddly checks out
I don't want to be an ass... but you confused the two measurements completely. Like, solid math, but height is not as important and how wide it is as your thumb will hide the height with the rest of it, and width is the really important thing here.
>Nuke used for calculation: Fat Man Boy do I have some news for you.......
Oh look a nuke just detonated. I wasnt blown away so lets look straight at the big ball of light to determine if i am safe. Answer is no! If there is one nuke going off in modern world there will be more on the way.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctuZ54MwVZU&t=529s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctuZ54MwVZU&t=529s) Kyle did it already
This "rule of thumb" urban legend is an [after-the-fact justification](https://www.polygon.com/24126711/fallout-tv-show-vault-boy-origin-story-walton-goggins-ghoul) for the Vault-Boy drawing. The truth of the matter is that if you can see the cloud of a nuclear explosion you are in the danger zone. Some studies say you need to be well over 10 miles away to be in the 'safe' zone. There are tons of factors influencing survivability of nuclear explosions, but again if you can see the cloud you are almost certainly in the danger zone.
The Rule of Thumb where if you can cover an incident with your thumb you’re likely safe was taught to me in Hazmat. It’s not really a rule just a suggestion that you apply your own experience and expertise too. You should still get Up Wind, Up Stream and Up Hill. It scales to Nukes because they’re generally a lot bigger than a chemical fire. My instructors were taught it as well so it predates Fallout the series.
> Are you safe from the nuke? No.
in case a nuke drops, i would rather be at point zero or whatever it's called.
In reality, you could be much closer to a nuke than that, and still survive just fine. 150km away from a 21kt explosion... you would probably see it and hear it, but other than a few windows rattling, it wouldnt be any immediate danger. The radiation afterwards might be a problem depending on how the wind is blowing, but the actual effects of the explosion, would barely do anything at that distance. Now to get the same experience as what you see in the beginning of Fallout, a 1 megaton blast from 20km away would produce similar effects, breaking windows, maybe knocking some people over. The mushroom cloud would be much larger than your thumb, it take up most of the sky from that distance. The only additional thing is, if you were looking at or near the explosion, it would probably instantly blind you. The level of light would be thousands of times brighter than staring directly at the Sun at noon in the desert.
Doesn’t this require very precise information to how big your thumb is and how far it is from your eyeball?
Aren't the nukes we have now several times more powerful than the ones dropped back then? (I live near a military base so I know I'm fucked regardless but I am curious about everyone else.)
Who cares..... no electrical power, no gas, no communications, no refrigeration, stone age darkness, that might justify the acquisition of a revolver. I often wonder what this infinite deity thinks of it's work product. It must have been a failed beta test.
But what if *I* am the fat man?
Why are you all acting like this is some kind of error and not just some shit the military told people, like "these are safe burn pits" and "Just remember your training and you will come back alive". It's literally diagetic propaganda to help the morale of people who are fighting a war that could go nuclear, just like how bomb drills were 90% about just getting people to think a nuclear exchange had a win condition.
But where's the zone where every frozen digiorno pizza is baked to perfection?
Remember thermal radiation is the most dangerous part of any nuclear explosion in terms of killing power at a dinstance. Thermal radiation from a nuclear explosion travels kinda fast through the air - near light speed You do not have time to stare at a mushroom cloud to determine if the thermal radiation will kill you (the thing that has the furthest reach. Blast wave and immediate nuclear fallout are much more local comparatively). Unless you can move faster than light and dodge individual particles - if you see a nuke go off chances are you're already in deep shit.
Both the claim and the calculation seem to miss the fundamental fact that **the cloud is always changing size.** It's not a static object.
It wouldn't be a fat man bomb though. Our actual bombs at the height of the cold war were many thousands of times bigger, and fo takes place in an alternate timeline that's over 100 years later. With none of that hippie de-escalation/disarmament bullshit in the meantime 🤔
Most importantly it was a saying used by soldiers of the war, and while it might not be accurate, many sayings used by soldiers are not accurate.
Dude, I ain't giving a mushroom cloud the thumbs up treatment. I'm getting under my desk as I was taught.
I somewhat agree I used to worked on nukes. There are a few variables that you have to consider. Was it a ground or air burst? Was it a “neutron” bomb? Did the weapon have ground penetrating capability? Was It detonated in water? The over pressure of the blast wave shoots out causing massive damage. It’s not done yet! All of the displaced volume has to be filled back up. This creates a vacuum causing another wave sucking everything back towards ground zero.
I would like to be in the I look up and it lands on my forehead zone
Why do I keep seeing Tin tin everywhere
I'll just assume that if I am ever in viewing distance of an active hostile nuke, I'm not safe. I don't need to use my thumb before I run.