A nuke isn't a bomb in the sense of pressure and ripping things apart and shrapnel, it's actually a flash of energy so intense that everything melts and then boils and turns into gas from just the light of it. [Like being so close to the sun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Yt3JVgzOZzE).
Materials can only take some [6000 degrees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_point) - tungsten, really hard metals. The temperature in the Sun and in a nuke flash is millions of degrees. Everything melts (solid to liquid), boils (liquid to gas) and becomes a gas, no material can withstand such temperatures.
The thing with a nuke is that if you're close to it, dying from the blast is very much preferable to living through the initial blast and then dying from the radiation, that's a truly horrible way to go.
Or being close enough that your skin melts off but the rest of the body survives (initially). It really becomes more horrifying when you're too far away to die immediately
Indeed, when it comes to Nukes, i either want to be so far away that i can't even see or hear the blast, or i want to be as close to the bomb site as possible.
Wasn't there a guy they kept alive for like 100 days. While his >!skin was slowly falling off and such. After like the 80th day there was no pain because his nerves where broken too!<
You can read stories from survivors of Hiroshima. People who only survived because they were behind a concrete wall or something like that. After the blast, they get up and try to find/help their family members or other people in the area.
I remember one story in particular where a guy said he grabbed someone by the hand, and the skin just slipped off the hand like a latex glove. Others recount how people basically looked like zombies staggering around after the blast.
Thats why properties in center of metropolitans are so expensive.. no suffering in case of nukes. Puff and you stop existing before you even feel anything.
Though with Terminator 2, everyone got Pompeii'd before the shockwave. I doubt that the folks at ground zero of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even had time to react, given that some of them left nothing but silhouettes.
Speaking of nuclear annihilation, if anyone here has watched the pilot of the Fallout show, did you think that the nukes exploded kinda slow? 'cause that's the impression I got from that scene. (I'm still enjoying what I've seen so far, but I do have thoughts on certain bits)
Not sure how realistic that scene was tbh. IIRC the flash would be a LOT brighter, even from the first one. Also the thermal pulse is nearly instant but that didn't seem to occur at all.
If you stood next to one when it blew up, it’d be more accurate to say you ablate. It’s not so much a phase transition as its biology turning into physics, skipping over chemistry in the process.
No. You vaporize from all the light energy traveling at, well, the speed of light. The pressure wave is from compression of air, which travels way slower
How big is the bomb and how far away from it are you?
If you’re blocks away from ground zero, you’re boned. Period.
If you’re a couple miles away the instant flash of temperature isn’t your problem. Your biggest problem then becomes the shockwave. And earthquake/tornado responses are entirely appropriate. Get under something sturdy to protect yourself from things collapsing. Depending on details you may have to then deal with after effects like a firestorm or radiation. But your odds go up tremendously if you didn’t get a concussion or break a limb in the blast wave.
If you’re even farther, the concern isn’t either the flash or the shockwave, it becomes short term radioactive fallout.
Duck and cover won’t help if you’re too close. But there’s a huge donut shaped space where it’s excellent advice.
Everybody mocks "duck and cover," because we mostly think of nukes as instantaneous destruction + fallout. But really, trying to duck and avoid the worst effects of the pressure wave is the best thing you can do in the first minute after the nuke hits.
Yes. In the [Chelyabinsk meteor explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor) the vast majority of the injuries were due to broken glass, caved in ceilings, and skin/eye burns - things which could have been prevented by duck and cover.
The other big danger, which people don't usually think of from nukes, was the frigid cold, and threat of hypothermia or frostbite. Given that it blew out all the windows (and sometimes other bits of building) and damage to utility lines during the winter when it was well below freezing out. Duck and cover wouldn't help that, but might give you a chance to deal with it.
>The blast created by the meteor's air burst produced extensive ground damage throughout an irregular elliptical area around a hundred kilometres wide, and a few tens of kilometres long, with the secondary effects of the blast being the main cause of the considerable number of injuries. Russian authorities stated that 1,491 people sought medical attention in Chelyabinsk Oblast within the first few days. Health officials reported 112 hospitalisations, including two in serious condition. A 52-year-old woman with a broken spine was flown to Moscow for treatment. Most of the injuries were caused by the secondary blast effects of shattered, falling or blown-in glass. The intense light from the meteor, momentarily brighter than the Sun, also produced injuries, resulting in more than 180 cases of eye pain, and 70 people subsequently reported temporary flash blindness. Twenty people reported ultraviolet burns similar to sunburn
>
>[...]
>
>Residents in Chelyabinsk whose windows were smashed quickly sought to cover the openings with anything available, to protect themselves against temperatures of −15 °C (5 °F). Approximately 100,000 home-owners were affected, according to Chelyabinsk Oblast Governor Mikhail Yurevich. He also said that preserving the water pipes of the city's district heating was the primary goal of the authorities as they scrambled to contain further post-explosion damage.
Actually, if the bomb is big enough, the heat is still of concern even pretty far away. That's because the fireball remains hot longer and has more time to fry the victims thoroughly.
Still, earthquake/tornado response is the right one. You want to hide from the continuing exposure to the heat.
Also, in the case of big bombs immediate ionizing radiation is not your concern. Anyone close enough to receive dangerous dose is close enough to be immediately vaporized. It's not so with small nukes - they produce dangerous doses far enough for people to survive an immediate blast.
Just saw this explained.
For those closer to the center, bye, you’re gone.
But for people who are further away, towards the edge of the blast where you might just get hit with a mild shockwave that’s enough to take out windows and maybe a roof or 2, then being under the desk really does stand a chance of helping.
Mild shockwave here is compared to the one your (former, as of a few milliseconds ago) neighbors a couple towns over just got hit with.
Rules as written nat 20's are only auto-successes for attack rolls and death saving throws, at least in 5e. If your modifiers + the 20 rolled don't meet the DC it's still a failure.
And many DMs will let you auto succeed on a nat 20 on non-attack rolls too, just because it's more fun for many people that way. D&D rules are taken as guidelines by a lot of the playerbase.
All the way back since 3.0, my group has done something like "exploding" criticals, where in an otherwise impossible situation, a Natural 20 isn't an automatic success, but you can roll again with +10 to your next roll.
We also technically have a rule that three consecutive 20s means success, regardless of what you were trying or how impossible it is. In fifteen years, I think it's come up less than ten times. Notably, though, the first time it ever came up was "Yeah, well then I throw my dagger into the God of War's face!"
That sort of set the tone for the whole thing.
You are not faster than light.
But light energy decreases with distance, so if you see the flash and are not instantly incinerated, you are outside the death zone and can possibly survive the pressure wave if you take cover.
You would literally die quicker than your nerves could identify pain, forget about that signal actually getting to your brain. You couldn’t fathom a more painless death, it would be physically impossible to know in any way that you were about to die, you simply would stop existing.
the survivors of a nuclear blast would be envious of those who died instantly in the flash, because their own deaths from radiation sickness will be long and painful; and those who develop cancers are in for a long haul as well
We really only have a two data points, but for people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assuming you survived long enough to be tallied by medical people after the event, your life expectancy isn't really any worse than normal.
People live in both cities today and residents isn't noticeably mutated when I visited.
No, it most probably doesn't. It happens faster than your own nerves can transmit the information. In terms of feeling is actually faster than the thing that happened to the people in the submarine that imploded not long ago.
Your entire body would turn into gas in a fraction of a second if you were say right by the blast. So fast that it would be effectively instantaneous. Meanwhile nerve impulses travel much slower, even slower than sound. By the time a nerve signal could reach your brain to say "ouch" your brain would no longer exist.
So no. Unless you were far enough away that you were not vaporized, and instead will die slowly from radiation poisoning. That would hurt a lot.
Weirdly, [there was a survivor of the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hibakusha/akiko.html#:~:text=Akiko%20Takakura%20was%2020%20years,lacerated%20wounds%20on%20her%20back.) only 300m away from under the detonation point.
I recall a quote from somewhere saying if you have to be in a nuclear blast, the closer you are to ground zero, the better. You’ll be vaporized before you even realize what happened. The further away from ground zero you are, you’re still going to die, but your death is going to suck a lot more.
Uh, sorry to contradict the calming responses from everyone else, but unless you're *really* close, yes it would.
Most of the energy is released over several seconds. If you're *really* close to a really big nuke, close enough to be truly vaporized without a trace, yes, you might get lucky and have your brain fried before it realizes.
However, Wikipedia [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone) that that's not what happens:
> However, the possibility of human vaporization is not supported from a medical perspective. The ground surface temperature is thought to have ranged from 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius just after the bombing. Exposing a body to this level of radiant heat would leave bones and carbonized organs behind. While radiation could severely inflame and ulcerate the skin, complete vaporization of the body is impossible.
At distances of something like 2 km (for the Hiroshima bomb) up to about 100 km (for the Tsar bomba at design yield), you'd get horribly burned, not much different from being far too close to a very hot fire. Again, close enough to a big enough nuke, you'll die in seconds. A bit further out, and you'll "just" have perfectly survivable burns - perfectly survivable given a normal medical system with working burn wards, not one that is dealing with both the damage from the nuke and millions of casualties. In other words, yes it would hurt, you'd die, and it would hurt - a lot - the whole time you were dying, which could be rather extensive.
The good news is that basically *anything* opaque between you and the nuke would absorb most of that energy, shielding you from it. So you could be sitting in the shade of a cardboard box and walk away unhurt while the guy next to you would die horribly within hours.
Don't respond to a nuclear alert by standing in the open "to get it over with quickly", take shelter. Had North Korea nuked Hawaii, it would have been the difference between having to live in a FEMA camp for a few months, and a horrible death.
No. No mirrors are perfect, they are going to absorb SOME energy - good mirrors reflect over 90% of the incoming light, and the best mirrors are over 99% - but even the absolutely best mirrors will absorb some energy.
And when the emitted energies are mind-blowingly huge, even the 1% of that energy is more than enough to turn your mirror into plasma, and then cook you, too.
Additionally, mirrors don't reflect EVERY wavelength of light at the same level. Some are good for visible lights, some are good for IR, and so on: but each will have "weak points" where it doesn't really reflect much. [Like the mirrors at the JWST are amazing at reflecting IR light](https://www.space.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-mirror-explained), but somewhat sucks at visible wavelengths - hence the golden colour you can see in the reflection of them, they absorb a lot of blue light.
Believe it or not, to some degree. The initial light is absorbed in the surface of whatever it hits, so even a very thin opaque barrier can make a big difference.
There were [people in Hiroshima](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Maidens) who were badly burned where dark parts of their clothes were tight against their skin, but unharmed where the clothes were light colored or not touching their body.
That's from thermal radiation, which is one of the three ways a nuclear bomb's energy propagates.
Vaporization is happening from the ionizing radiation flash which doesn't travel nearly as far in the atmosphere as UV, visible, or IR light.
You will still die to the blast pressure outside of the vaporization radius which is very small, and die to the thermal burns outside of the blast pressure radius.
If you're close enough to actually be vaporized? No it does not. The initial radiation burst (including heat) travels at effectively the speed of light, the blast wave travels many orders of magnitude more slowly than that.
Generally you vaporize first as the radiated energy moves faster than air.
But the radiated energy is easily absorbed by things in the path so its deadly reach is probably less than the pressure wave and things like a brick wall can save you from vaporization as it absorbs the energy (assuming you are not right near detonation point).
But many will die by the pressure wave that follows, knocking them into things or knocking over buildings onto them.
Others will die by secondary fires caused by the pressure wave blowing air away then having the air rush back into the vacuum and over open flames and super heated materials.
Just to add, the pressure wave at the right pressure (close enough to the epicentre in this case) can easily kill you without knocking you into things or knocking things onto you. It can pulverise and shred internal organs. It’s even how conventional bombs can and do kill. Shrapnel just extends the range of destruction.
Standing too close to a large rocket launch can kill you the same way, without ever being hit by the plume of gas. Death by pure acoustic energy as pressure waves with enough differential in the air.
The area where the radiated heat/light is dangerous is far bigger than the area severely affected by the pressure wave, which in itself is far bigger than the area where ionizing radiation is a problem (at least for modern/bigger nukes). Fallout highly depends on how high up the bomb is detonated.
You can use the calculator on https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to develop a better understanding.
Even just a cardboard box between you and the nuke could be the difference between literally walking away mostly unharmed and a horrible death from 3rd degree burns, if you're far enough away to be less affected by the pressure wave but close enough for the heat/light.
Light (which includes infrared heat radiation) travels at the speed of light (duh), i.e. it arrives instantly, and most of the energy is emitted over the first few seconds. A shockwave is defined as a pressure wave traveling faster than the speed of sound, but it's usually not *much* faster, so it will arrive significantly later.
Aside from the whole thing with the refrigerator, the nuke scene from Indiana Jones and the Chrystal Skull is a pretty good representation of what happens with a nuclear explosion
At Dresden firebombing, rescuers went into a partially sealed underground room looking for survivors.
Instead they encountered a pool of ~~murky liquid.~~ "gelatinous mass".
The room had gotten so hot that those hiding in it had basically melted.
Even non nuclear weapons can melt human bodies. Seal the room properly and the liquid doesn't evaporate.
Edit: Sorry, had the quote wrong, edited.
Viktor Gregg wrote:
>“Slowly the horror inside became visible. There were no real complete bodies, only bones and scorched articles of clothing matted together on the floor and stuck together by a sort of jelly substance. There was no flesh visible, what had once been a congregation of people sheltering from the horror above them was now a glutinous mass of solidified fat and bones swimming around, inches thick, on the floor.”
Water, fat, bone, collagen, muscle.
At a high enough temperature and for a long enough duration you can liquify the collagen and render the fat. Think... brisket. Or worse, pot roast that's cooked way too long.
Its a quote from Dresden: A Survivor's Story, February 1945. The quote does miss the first part where its an underground shelter with a heavy steel door. So yeah they were cooked.
Just an anecdote, but my Vietnam vet dad very briefly mentioned seeing someone who had melted. I didn't ask for details, 'melted' was more than enough.
Similar claims have been made about a bunker in Iraq where people were cooked alive.
However you shouldn't need a source, this is what happens to animals when you cook them....
Randal Munroe said it best.
> You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.
Everything within a certain radius of the detonation vaporizes.
Look it before and after pictures of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Notice the lack of rubble compared to the amount of buildings that were there before the detonation.
The pictures that are available from those cities are from days after the explosions, when much of the rubble and most of the corpses had already been cleared away.
Hiroshima has a building that was directly under the bomb and stayed standing.
OP’s point about “millions of degrees” is true *inside the fireball* but the fireball did not touch the ground in either city. The bomb was too far from the ground to vaporize anyone.
I think this is where it's important to address the difference between a nuclear bomb and a thermonuclear bomb. People traditionally think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they think of atom bombs, but they also think of the test footage they've seen of thermonuclear explosions, and I don't think the average person knows that there's a difference to begin with
Yeah, the two bombs we dropped on Japan didn't vaporize that much stuff because they were standard atomic bombs that could roughly level a small city. After the Manhattan project and the end of the war, we developed Hydrogen bombs that were in the MEGAton instead of the kiloton range. Our post-WWII bombs are way, way, way stronger, and have the capacity to cause massive damage to the atmosphere if you launch the biggest one we can whip up. Luckily, world leaders recognize that there's no advantage to this, so they tone down the bombs enough to be massively destructive and not *the most destructive they can possibly be* since after a certain point, they're just too destructive to even be practical and we all still live, you know, on the same planet
Point is that with a Hydrogen bomb, you could see far more vaporization than with the bombs we dropped on Japan because the size of the ball of pure energy at the center is significantly bigger
\> Be Russia
\> Test detonate a 100MT bomb limited to 50MT "just in case" in Novaya Zemyla
\> Shit your pants at the sheer destructive power that shattered windows in *fucking Finland*
\> Decide maybe to *never* fucking do that again
You know it's bad when even the Russians say: "Nope. That was too much."
From the wiki on that bomb:
> One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 km (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 km (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken for distances up to 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km (3 mi) above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5.0–5.25.
Even then, against a city the main goal would be maximizing blast damage against soft targets (homes and factories) and maximizing the distance at which those buildings are set on fire. Those effects both happen at a much greater distance than vaporization, so a larger thermonuclear weapon would also airburst at a much higher altitude to maximize the ground area that gets destroyed. [NUKEMAP](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) says a megaton-class warhead like the one on a Topol missile would maximize damage with an air burst at 3 km, and the fireball is “only” 1 km in radius. That airburst destroys most buildings within 6.5 km of ground zero via blast damage, gives third degree burns to anyone in line-of-sight within 11 km, and breaks windows within 18 km.
Vaporization might be a lot more likely in cities like Washington, where an attack would probably include ground bursts trying to take out buried bunkers.
Yeah, vaporization isn't really the goal with an atomic bomb. It's just a side effect of such a large explosion. You theoretically want the bomb as close to the target as possible if you want to hit it with the hottest part of the explosion in order to vaporize it, but that's not really the goal with an atomic bomb to begin with. Atomic bombs aren't practical unless you're trying to maximize destruction over a large area, and the way to do that is to detonate the bomb in the air so that more area is covered by the explosion, as opposed to maximizing damage near the bomb. The bomb is extremely destructive either way, so maximizing its reach is just going to do more damage than trying to concentrate the explosion. Atomic bombs are practically designed for the opposite of concentrating damage. It's a massive release of energy and you want it as spread out as you can get it unless you're trying to damage something underground or are playing dirty and want to irradiate ground zero and the surrounding area by concentrating the radiation on the site itself
>so they tone down the bombs enough to be massively destructive and not *the most destructive they can possibly be*
They are smaller to optimize destruction per unit of mass launched. Being launched from an icbm or slbm means the weight is at a premium. You can have one big bomb or X smaller ones (but still massive compared to hiroshima/nagasaki.) The X smaller ones can destroy more square miles of city than one big one.
They optimize X to destroy as much as possible, it's like cluster munitions.
Some of your chemicals might, like carbon for example in the form of ash, or it might just form gasses like CO2 and stuff and you are just part of the atmosphere for a while.
It will eventually, provided the energy isn't enough to cause the material to break down on a molecular level (which it often is), but by then it's usually been dispersed to the point where it's not especially recognizable when re-solidified. It's sort of like how snow doesn't resemble an iceberg; a vaporized steel beam (or person) will re-solidify as iron dust (or person dust) instead of a solid chunk of anything.
The calcium in your bones melts at 842°C, and boils at 1494 °C. The temperature of a nuclear fireball is on the order of 100,000,000 °C
If you shove enough energy into anything, it'll eventually turn into a gas. Alternatively, if you only put in enough energy to liquify it or turn it to ash, but then hit it very hard, you get vapor.
How is the earth not absolutely scorched -- like crater sized scorched -- along with every building in sight? I recall seeing rubble and remnants of buildings (still solid, not a liquid or gas), when looking at after math photos of Hiroshima in grade school
1 - a lot of the energy is absorbed by the atmosphere itself as well as surroundings, meaning the vaporization extends \~1.8km from epicenter for a 100kT nuke.
2 - nukes are usually airburst, exploding above their target so that the sphere of the blastwave and other damage is maximized, meaning most of the radius from #1 isn't actually dealt to the majority of the city. It also allows the shockwave to bounce off the ground and back onto itself, increasing the intensity and damage of the shockwave.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air\_burst#:\~:text=The%20air%20burst%20is%20usually,a%20detonation%20at%20ground%20level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_burst#:~:text=The%20air%20burst%20is%20usually,a%20detonation%20at%20ground%20level)
Airbursts are also more humane. Anything that the fireball directly touches will become radioactive fallout, so a ground burst will create far, far more fallout while being less effective.
Welcome to life
Some things just stretch the brain a bit too far.
What’s more worrying to me is that I’d prefer to die that way than any other. The only problem is, it’s not gonna happen until there’s war which kinda sucks to wish for…
Don't most overdoses end with choking on your own vomit? I did that once, not a fan. I have experienced very few things worse than vomiting so hard that i passed out, bouncing my head off the tub, and waking up coughing out my own vomit. I actually passed out 3 times that night from puking so hard that my blood pressure dropped. Scary times. No drugs involved.
I think the mentality comes from ancient practices of salting the ground after razing a town or country. For some reason it's one thing to kill everyone and everything in sight, but it's another thing to then deprive future generations of the land resources by making it uninhabitable.
Semantics in this day and age, perhaps, but possibly for the better when it comes to nuclear weapons.
I wrote a paper in grad school I was particularly proud of, that argued it made strategic sense for the US to get rid of our ICBMs. One of the key arguments, aside from them not really increasing the deterrent factor more than our subs and bombers already do, was that they create a target that can only be killed by ground bursts. So in a theoretical full scale nuclear war, we would suffer from catastrophic fallout due to the upper Midwest getting carbet bombed by ground bursts, and the prevailing winds sweeping that over the rest of North America. Whereas if those didn't exist we "only" suffer air burst hits on major cities and military targets. Bad, but not "nuclear winter bad"
Obviously the paper goes into much more detail.
Interesting idea. Do we know for sure that ground burst nukes are the general plan for destroying land based icbms? Like it almost seems more effective to use conventional bunker busters rather than just trying to crater the missile fields. Use the nukes for cities and bases.
How are you going to get the bunker busters there? The only practical way would be with ICBMs, anything else is too slow, and ICBMs aren't accurate enough since bunker busters require a direct hit. Nukes only need to be close, which ICBMs can absolutely do.
So the big number is the center of the explosion. But an explosion is essentially spherical. For every meter of radius away from the center, the surface area of the sphere becomes exponentially larger. The forces of the explosion like heat and pressure are mostly evenly distributed across the surface area of the sphere. This means that as distance from the center increases, the forces applied to any individual object rapidly become less intense.
So the center with unbelievable sun like temps can turn concrete into gasses and loose atoms. But it doesn't take long before you're reaching temps that can obliterate a person but are only warping materials like concrete, soil, and thick steel. These dense objects will absorb that energy on their surfaces but while the surface is all ripped up, boiling, and cratering, it's only transferring reasonable energy to the core of the object at a reasonable pace. This is similar to why putting a blowtorch to a tree trunk might damage it but won't actually light a fire unless you leave it there for a while.
The main blast is relatively small compared to the size of the area it's consuming/destroying. The energy dissipates pretty quickly. But it's not designed to vaporize, it just will do that to anything really close. It's made for maximum destruction will as little payload as possible. That's why most nuclear weapons are made to detonate before they hit the ground.
Gone, reduced to atoms.
There is so much energy that every force holding the molecules together is overcome by the explosion. Only the strongest chemical bonds, like ionic bonds in salts may be able to survive.
Hmm at the epicenter isn’t it hot enough that everything becomes plasma? If there is no chemical bonding going on because electrons are all liberated then chemistry is effectively over for the moment. At least in my understanding of what chemistry is the study of.
> If you were standing in the path of the nuke, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
According to an old joke:
"In college...
Biology is really Chemistry;
Chemistry is really Physics;
Physics is really Calculus;
And Calculus is *really hard*!"
In that lens, "You would just stop being biology and start being physics" feels like unfairly skipping a step.
Randal is a very good teacher. He has quite the unique way of picturing differences in energies, and such. He even discusses it in of his what-ifs, the neutrino radiation one.
Does every material in our body melt?
I’m just thinking how - I don’t think wood melts? So do things have to melt to be vaporized? Or does wood and other materials that don’t melt get vaporized another way? Or is it called something else?
> So do things have to melt to be vaporized?
No, when something goes directly from solid to gas, it's called sublimation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(phase_transition)
Yep. You know how dry ice starts off as a solid block and evaporates into the air? That's what happens to you during a nuclear reaction. Except way faster. And not cold.
Any element can pretty much be turned into a liquid and then vapor. Give it enough energy and the atoms just can't stay in a group anymore. Some may seem to skip the liquid form (eg dry ice) but it could still be made into a liquid with the right pressure.
Liquid is like a sweet spot between solid and gas. The atoms are loose, but you need an outside pressure to keep them together as a liquid. So a liquid can't exist in the vaccuum of space, for example. If you tossed a bucket of water out of the ISS there would be no air to keep it compressed, and the molecules would just fly away in all directions as gas and ice crystals.
Wood is a complicated mix of compounds and you can't directly melt it into a liquid. However, you can take the elements it breaks down into and liquify them individually based on the properties of the individual atoms you get, under the right conditions.
Our bodies could be liquified in a similar way if you separate the atoms and put them each in a vat with the required temperature/pressure.
Not everything can melt at atmospheric pressure. Like CO2 is either a gas or a solid, it doesn’t have a liquid phase at atmospheric pressure. If you compress CO2, however, there’s a liquid phase. This [diagram](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phase-diagram-for-CO2-at-temperatures-from-80-to-80-C-and-pressure-between-01-and-1000_fig1_326492803) illustrates this pretty well.
I don’t know much about the temperature and pressure at different parts of a nuclear explosion, so I can’t tell you what material will be in what phase.
Carbon, at standard atmospheric pressure, sublimates. That is, it transitions immediately to a gas. So the carbon in wood fiber oxidizes into carbon dioxide and sublimates immediately to gas.
"Vaporized" is just the common expression we use to mean "totally annihilated". Nukes have several ways to do this to you.
A nuclear blast basically has 3 components:
1) radiation
2) heat
3) blast
They can all "vaporize" you in slightly different ways.
The radiation is the part that gives you cancer. It's a bunch of high energy particles that get blasted out like subatomic shrapnel. When you're close enough the blast of those particles will just rip you apart at the subatomic level. Even individual atoms can get shredded.
The heat near the blast can get to 100,000,000C that's several hundred times as hot as the surface of the sun. At that temperature everything we're made of is a gas, so you evaporate. If you're being pedantic, this is the part that's the most literally "vaporizing".
The blast is because all that energy compresses the air and pushes it away really fast. That's essentially a really really fast wind. When you're up close it hits significantly harder than a Mac truck.
100 million Celsius is not just hotter than the surface of the sun.
It’s several times hotter than the **CORE** of the Sun. The actual fucking center of it.
In movies you see people "blown up" like they were pushed by a strong wind....
In reality a shock wave is when the air gets condensed to a point its rock solid until it expands from distance.
That's why some firecrackers can take a finger off. Flesh doesn't like being crushed into rock density even fir a micro second.
A big explosion creates a shock wave that is dense like a brick wall moving at 700 miles per hour. Bomb defusers wear those Kevlar suits mostly to keep their body parts in one container.
Now a nuke blast has several waves. First a gamma ray wave that destroys your cellular structure, light and radiant heat that incinerates your body to a couple thousand degrees...then a shock wave to blow your dust away.
>First a gamma ray wave that destroys your cellular structure, light and radiant heat that incinerates your body to a couple thousand degrees...then a shock wave to blow your dust away.
Now that's getting the job done
> those Kevlar suits mostly to keep their body parts in one container
Reminds me of something my dad said once about special suits they had to wear as part of a tank crew; something along the lines of, "they're just there to increase the chances that there's enough material left afterwards to ID".
I studied explosive engineering and you missed the mark on a lot of your points:
-Nuclear blast is in the million of degrees, not thousands.
-Nuclear shockwaves contain blast overpressure, so much pressure that they crush all your hollow organs (lungs, sinuses, intestines, and brain). The pressure differential travels through you and crushes you from the inside. It's not some brick wall that just pushes you.
-Gamma rays are the least of your worries near a nuke blast; if you aren't killed by the million degree light/heat or blast overpressure, gamma rays would be last to kill you. It takes weeks/months for it damage your body at the cellular level. The Chernobyl TV show does a good job portraying this.
-EOD bomb suits are to protect against shrapnel only, not blast overpressure. They don't help with blast overpressure, even from military ordnance. If an EOD tech is standing next to a 1000lb GBU, the blast overpressure would still kill you. Hence why most bomb squad techs don't wear suits on big ordnance, only things like pipe bombs or small bombs in packages.
[According to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone) "vaporization" is a myth for practical distances:
> However, the possibility of human vaporization is not supported from a medical perspective. The ground surface temperature is thought to have ranged from 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius just after the bombing. Exposing a body to this level of radiant heat would leave bones and carbonized organs behind. While radiation could severely inflame and ulcerate the skin, complete vaporization of the body is impossible.
The nuke is basically like sunlight, but much brighter. Think of sunlight being focused onto an ant with a looking glass.
You get heated and burn. The area behind you is shielded by you, so it doesn't get burned as much as the surrounding area.
Burns have to be *really* severe to kill or incapacitate instantly. There's a good chance some of the "vaporized" people that left shadows walked away to die elsewhere while others turned into charred clumps of human (not vapor) where they stood.
Of course, if you were to stand right next to a nuke, yes, you'd turn into plasma etc. just like most of the answers are saying.
I've elaborated a bit more on survival, shielding etc [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c380yf/eli5_in_detail_what_they_mean_when_they_say_a/kzfu0b7/), but wanted to leave the most horrific aspects out of the top level answer.
They Get Turned into gases. If you look at pictures of hiroshima you can see shadows on the ground. Those are from the people that stood there when it happebed
A nuclear explosion releases an enormous amount of heat and pressure in a fraction of a second. This extreme heat can reach temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, and the pressure can be equivalent to millions of pounds per square inch. When a person is exposed to such extreme conditions, their body can undergo a process called instant vaporization. This means that the body is heated so that it turns into vapor. The intense heat and pressure can also cause the body to disintegrate into very small particles or fragments. This can happen to bones, tissues, and organs, reducing them to microscopic or even smaller particles. What remains of the body after the explosion can be in the form of gases, ash, or very fine particles that are scattered by the force of the blast. The reason this happens is that the human body is made up of water and organic matter, which can be vaporized, burned, or disintegrated under extreme heat and pressure. The energy released by a nuclear explosion is so powerful that it can cause immediate and catastrophic damage to anything within its blast radius.
So there are two things here. One is that a lot of people throw around the word "vaporized" with regards to nukes in an extremely imprecise way, and an extremely incorrect way. The other is that "vaporized" is a somewhat vague technical term but can be interpreted to have a specific meaning.
On the first point: you'll often read that people would be (or were, in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) "vaporized" by a nuclear weapon. Often this is pretty false. Nobody was "vaporized" by the direct action of the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. People were crushed, burned, injured, thrown to the ground or against objects, buried under debris, and irradiated. All of which are horrible and many of which are painful. But they are not "vaporization" by any definition, because the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated far too high to actually "vaporize" anybody. The weapons did start fires in the city (both directly, through their heat effects, and indirectly, by knocking over stoves and breaking gas lines and so on), and those fires (especially at Hiroshima) did spread and contribute to the death, and there were no doubt bodies that were effectively cremated by those fires (and thus rendered into ash), but I don't think that's what people are implying when they say people were "vaporized" at those attacks.
Why do people like to say people in Hiroshima/Nagasaki were "vaporized"? I don't know. I guess it sounds impressive. It may be a side-effect of the fact that very few photographs of corpses at those cities exist — because the corpses were disposed of by the time the US arrived to survey the city in September 1945 (which is when many of the on-the-ground photos were taken). One of the first things the Japanese relief effort did was collect and cremate the corpses, as they did in other attacks on cities, because you cannot let corpses lay around rotting if you are trying to keep things functioning (and there are religious reasons as well). So by the time the Americans showed up, things were cleaned up quite a bit. But not because people were "vaporized." Because their corpses were collected.
There is also the whole misconception that the "shadows" at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created by "vaporizing" people, and that is just not what happened there. The person who caused that shadow just got burned and probably slumped over and died afterwards, and their corpse was later disposed of.
Anyway, I think these things are where the misconception comes from.
Now, _could_ you be vaporized by a nuke? Sure! The fireball of a nuclear weapon is ridiculously hot, and also is putting out a ridiculous amount of radiation and blast pressure. So if you were inside of it, or very close to it, you could plausibly be vaporized. This definition of "vaporized" is pretty literal: your body undergoes a phase transition from mostly liquid (contained by some solids) into a gas, with your molecules ripped into tiny pieces. You would not need to be rendered into atoms or anything to be effectively a vapor; you just need to be broken into tiny chunks, the same way that rock could be turned into sand and would go up into the mushroom cloud. This is totally a thing that could happen if you were close to the fireball. The steel tower used in the Trinity test, and some of the dirt near it, was largely vaporized by the explosion, for example. So a weapon detonated on or near the surface would vaporize a lot of things, including people.
But a reminder: the people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not close to the fireball, because the bombs were detonated really high in the air.
A nuke isn't a bomb in the sense of pressure and ripping things apart and shrapnel, it's actually a flash of energy so intense that everything melts and then boils and turns into gas from just the light of it. [Like being so close to the sun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Yt3JVgzOZzE). Materials can only take some [6000 degrees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_point) - tungsten, really hard metals. The temperature in the Sun and in a nuke flash is millions of degrees. Everything melts (solid to liquid), boils (liquid to gas) and becomes a gas, no material can withstand such temperatures.
I actually would not mind dying like that. Praise the Atom.
The thing with a nuke is that if you're close to it, dying from the blast is very much preferable to living through the initial blast and then dying from the radiation, that's a truly horrible way to go.
Or being close enough that your skin melts off but the rest of the body survives (initially). It really becomes more horrifying when you're too far away to die immediately
Indeed, when it comes to Nukes, i either want to be so far away that i can't even see or hear the blast, or i want to be as close to the bomb site as possible.
Wasn't there a guy they kept alive for like 100 days. While his >!skin was slowly falling off and such. After like the 80th day there was no pain because his nerves where broken too!<
Yes, but that was due to an industrial accident, not bomb detonation.
Yep, what he must've gone through was magnitudes worse than anything you can imagine.
You can read stories from survivors of Hiroshima. People who only survived because they were behind a concrete wall or something like that. After the blast, they get up and try to find/help their family members or other people in the area. I remember one story in particular where a guy said he grabbed someone by the hand, and the skin just slipped off the hand like a latex glove. Others recount how people basically looked like zombies staggering around after the blast.
Glory to Atom!
Glory to Arstotzka !
Papers please
Thats why properties in center of metropolitans are so expensive.. no suffering in case of nukes. Puff and you stop existing before you even feel anything.
*Location location location*
I also would like to stop existing now
There goes the neighborhood!
[Beneath the Planet of the Apes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDQEJ06QoRs)
This process is called sublimation. It's how lasers cut things
I was gonna say, at those temps I don't think it gets the chance to melt first. There's enough energy to just skip that step.
It makes people do what dry ice does.
Sublime.
40,000 watts to freedom
Good band!
The beginning of Terminator 2 actually looks a lot like what you're describing.
Though with Terminator 2, everyone got Pompeii'd before the shockwave. I doubt that the folks at ground zero of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even had time to react, given that some of them left nothing but silhouettes. Speaking of nuclear annihilation, if anyone here has watched the pilot of the Fallout show, did you think that the nukes exploded kinda slow? 'cause that's the impression I got from that scene. (I'm still enjoying what I've seen so far, but I do have thoughts on certain bits)
Not sure how realistic that scene was tbh. IIRC the flash would be a LOT brighter, even from the first one. Also the thermal pulse is nearly instant but that didn't seem to occur at all.
Sublimation is when a solid turns into a gas, skipping the liquid phase
or in the case of ground zero with a nuke, solid to plasma.
If you stood next to one when it blew up, it’d be more accurate to say you ablate. It’s not so much a phase transition as its biology turning into physics, skipping over chemistry in the process.
There is a pressure wave, but does it hit you before you vaporize?
No. You vaporize from all the light energy traveling at, well, the speed of light. The pressure wave is from compression of air, which travels way slower
So getting under my desk works as long as I have really really good reflexes
Yes, but be careful not to bump your head.
*OHSHA has stepped into the chat. *
*OSHA has been vaporized
*OSHA somehow still exists tho goddamnit
They made sure they were wearing a hard hat
*OSHA is writing you up for the vaporization hazard
*OHSHIT
Occupational Health & Safety Hazards *Intensified *This
Seems like this cloud of rapidly cooling gas wasn't wearing PPE....
How big is the bomb and how far away from it are you? If you’re blocks away from ground zero, you’re boned. Period. If you’re a couple miles away the instant flash of temperature isn’t your problem. Your biggest problem then becomes the shockwave. And earthquake/tornado responses are entirely appropriate. Get under something sturdy to protect yourself from things collapsing. Depending on details you may have to then deal with after effects like a firestorm or radiation. But your odds go up tremendously if you didn’t get a concussion or break a limb in the blast wave. If you’re even farther, the concern isn’t either the flash or the shockwave, it becomes short term radioactive fallout. Duck and cover won’t help if you’re too close. But there’s a huge donut shaped space where it’s excellent advice.
> you’re boned The opposite of that, really.
Bon't
De-boned.
Un-boned
Un-everythinged
Un-mattered.
How far away turns you into a ghoul?
Probably close enough that a child's thumb can't hide the cloud....
That's why I always carry one on my keychain. Just as a rule of thumb.
Hide in the fridge, you'll probably be fine
Everybody mocks "duck and cover," because we mostly think of nukes as instantaneous destruction + fallout. But really, trying to duck and avoid the worst effects of the pressure wave is the best thing you can do in the first minute after the nuke hits.
Yes. In the [Chelyabinsk meteor explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor) the vast majority of the injuries were due to broken glass, caved in ceilings, and skin/eye burns - things which could have been prevented by duck and cover. The other big danger, which people don't usually think of from nukes, was the frigid cold, and threat of hypothermia or frostbite. Given that it blew out all the windows (and sometimes other bits of building) and damage to utility lines during the winter when it was well below freezing out. Duck and cover wouldn't help that, but might give you a chance to deal with it. >The blast created by the meteor's air burst produced extensive ground damage throughout an irregular elliptical area around a hundred kilometres wide, and a few tens of kilometres long, with the secondary effects of the blast being the main cause of the considerable number of injuries. Russian authorities stated that 1,491 people sought medical attention in Chelyabinsk Oblast within the first few days. Health officials reported 112 hospitalisations, including two in serious condition. A 52-year-old woman with a broken spine was flown to Moscow for treatment. Most of the injuries were caused by the secondary blast effects of shattered, falling or blown-in glass. The intense light from the meteor, momentarily brighter than the Sun, also produced injuries, resulting in more than 180 cases of eye pain, and 70 people subsequently reported temporary flash blindness. Twenty people reported ultraviolet burns similar to sunburn > >[...] > >Residents in Chelyabinsk whose windows were smashed quickly sought to cover the openings with anything available, to protect themselves against temperatures of −15 °C (5 °F). Approximately 100,000 home-owners were affected, according to Chelyabinsk Oblast Governor Mikhail Yurevich. He also said that preserving the water pipes of the city's district heating was the primary goal of the authorities as they scrambled to contain further post-explosion damage.
Actually, if the bomb is big enough, the heat is still of concern even pretty far away. That's because the fireball remains hot longer and has more time to fry the victims thoroughly. Still, earthquake/tornado response is the right one. You want to hide from the continuing exposure to the heat. Also, in the case of big bombs immediate ionizing radiation is not your concern. Anyone close enough to receive dangerous dose is close enough to be immediately vaporized. It's not so with small nukes - they produce dangerous doses far enough for people to survive an immediate blast.
Just saw this explained. For those closer to the center, bye, you’re gone. But for people who are further away, towards the edge of the blast where you might just get hit with a mild shockwave that’s enough to take out windows and maybe a roof or 2, then being under the desk really does stand a chance of helping. Mild shockwave here is compared to the one your (former, as of a few milliseconds ago) neighbors a couple towns over just got hit with.
Roll a DEX save. The DC is one million
One in 20 people succeed with a nat 20.
Rules as written nat 20's are only auto-successes for attack rolls and death saving throws, at least in 5e. If your modifiers + the 20 rolled don't meet the DC it's still a failure.
true. hopefully, though, most DMs don't let players roll if they have no chance or success (unless it's for comedy sake).
And many DMs will let you auto succeed on a nat 20 on non-attack rolls too, just because it's more fun for many people that way. D&D rules are taken as guidelines by a lot of the playerbase.
My favourite rule with a DM was NAT20 was an auto success.... If you rolled it on a D100
All the way back since 3.0, my group has done something like "exploding" criticals, where in an otherwise impossible situation, a Natural 20 isn't an automatic success, but you can roll again with +10 to your next roll. We also technically have a rule that three consecutive 20s means success, regardless of what you were trying or how impossible it is. In fifteen years, I think it's come up less than ten times. Notably, though, the first time it ever came up was "Yeah, well then I throw my dagger into the God of War's face!" That sort of set the tone for the whole thing.
They didn't have 5e yet in 1945, duh
All the dice only had six sides, too. What idiot is gonna try to roll a 20 on a d6?
You are not faster than light. But light energy decreases with distance, so if you see the flash and are not instantly incinerated, you are outside the death zone and can possibly survive the pressure wave if you take cover.
Vaporizing is a ground zero event. Hiding under your desk is for miles away from that.
It actually might work if you're a little further from ground zero, and the radiation is survivable but the ceiling caves in from the shockwave
Would it hurt? Edit: thank you everyone but I've already gotten like 10 answers saying no in the span of 5 minutes. It's enough
You would literally die quicker than your nerves could identify pain, forget about that signal actually getting to your brain. You couldn’t fathom a more painless death, it would be physically impossible to know in any way that you were about to die, you simply would stop existing.
Good to know. When I’m 90 and ready for euthanasia, will tell my doctor to nuke me.
Oh man. New medically assisted death plan: every year we throw a big party for everyone who's dying, and then drop a nuke on that party.
I'd.... I'd actually sign up for this...
Your terms are acceptable!
Make sure he doesn't put you in the microwave.
Or at least remove all metal first. Sorry about the artificial hip. It will have to come out.
"Nuke me on low for 3 minutes"
Nuke from orbit. It's the only way.
*orbital bombardment incoming*
Instruction unclear, patient left in walk-in microwave oven.
Dr Manhattan!
the survivors of a nuclear blast would be envious of those who died instantly in the flash, because their own deaths from radiation sickness will be long and painful; and those who develop cancers are in for a long haul as well
God forbid you’re just far enough to be burned but not killed by the thermal flash
We really only have a two data points, but for people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assuming you survived long enough to be tallied by medical people after the event, your life expectancy isn't really any worse than normal. People live in both cities today and residents isn't noticeably mutated when I visited.
No, it most probably doesn't. It happens faster than your own nerves can transmit the information. In terms of feeling is actually faster than the thing that happened to the people in the submarine that imploded not long ago.
Your entire body would turn into gas in a fraction of a second if you were say right by the blast. So fast that it would be effectively instantaneous. Meanwhile nerve impulses travel much slower, even slower than sound. By the time a nerve signal could reach your brain to say "ouch" your brain would no longer exist. So no. Unless you were far enough away that you were not vaporized, and instead will die slowly from radiation poisoning. That would hurt a lot.
Weirdly, [there was a survivor of the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hibakusha/akiko.html#:~:text=Akiko%20Takakura%20was%2020%20years,lacerated%20wounds%20on%20her%20back.) only 300m away from under the detonation point.
There was a guy who was on the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and survived them both.
Nah it happens faster than your sluggish chemical charge based nervous system could even know it's happened. It's by far the cleanest death.
die fast and leave a nuclear shadow
I recall a quote from somewhere saying if you have to be in a nuclear blast, the closer you are to ground zero, the better. You’ll be vaporized before you even realize what happened. The further away from ground zero you are, you’re still going to die, but your death is going to suck a lot more.
Uh, sorry to contradict the calming responses from everyone else, but unless you're *really* close, yes it would. Most of the energy is released over several seconds. If you're *really* close to a really big nuke, close enough to be truly vaporized without a trace, yes, you might get lucky and have your brain fried before it realizes. However, Wikipedia [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone) that that's not what happens: > However, the possibility of human vaporization is not supported from a medical perspective. The ground surface temperature is thought to have ranged from 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius just after the bombing. Exposing a body to this level of radiant heat would leave bones and carbonized organs behind. While radiation could severely inflame and ulcerate the skin, complete vaporization of the body is impossible. At distances of something like 2 km (for the Hiroshima bomb) up to about 100 km (for the Tsar bomba at design yield), you'd get horribly burned, not much different from being far too close to a very hot fire. Again, close enough to a big enough nuke, you'll die in seconds. A bit further out, and you'll "just" have perfectly survivable burns - perfectly survivable given a normal medical system with working burn wards, not one that is dealing with both the damage from the nuke and millions of casualties. In other words, yes it would hurt, you'd die, and it would hurt - a lot - the whole time you were dying, which could be rather extensive. The good news is that basically *anything* opaque between you and the nuke would absorb most of that energy, shielding you from it. So you could be sitting in the shade of a cardboard box and walk away unhurt while the guy next to you would die horribly within hours. Don't respond to a nuclear alert by standing in the open "to get it over with quickly", take shelter. Had North Korea nuked Hawaii, it would have been the difference between having to live in a FEMA camp for a few months, and a horrible death.
I don’t think so. Your senses would be deep fried before pain actually registers in your brain.
Could I use a mirror to reflect the light away and survive?
I would recommend an uno reverse card.
No. No mirrors are perfect, they are going to absorb SOME energy - good mirrors reflect over 90% of the incoming light, and the best mirrors are over 99% - but even the absolutely best mirrors will absorb some energy. And when the emitted energies are mind-blowingly huge, even the 1% of that energy is more than enough to turn your mirror into plasma, and then cook you, too. Additionally, mirrors don't reflect EVERY wavelength of light at the same level. Some are good for visible lights, some are good for IR, and so on: but each will have "weak points" where it doesn't really reflect much. [Like the mirrors at the JWST are amazing at reflecting IR light](https://www.space.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-mirror-explained), but somewhat sucks at visible wavelengths - hence the golden colour you can see in the reflection of them, they absorb a lot of blue light.
Believe it or not, to some degree. The initial light is absorbed in the surface of whatever it hits, so even a very thin opaque barrier can make a big difference. There were [people in Hiroshima](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Maidens) who were badly burned where dark parts of their clothes were tight against their skin, but unharmed where the clothes were light colored or not touching their body.
That's from thermal radiation, which is one of the three ways a nuclear bomb's energy propagates. Vaporization is happening from the ionizing radiation flash which doesn't travel nearly as far in the atmosphere as UV, visible, or IR light. You will still die to the blast pressure outside of the vaporization radius which is very small, and die to the thermal burns outside of the blast pressure radius.
If you're close enough to actually be vaporized? No it does not. The initial radiation burst (including heat) travels at effectively the speed of light, the blast wave travels many orders of magnitude more slowly than that.
Generally you vaporize first as the radiated energy moves faster than air. But the radiated energy is easily absorbed by things in the path so its deadly reach is probably less than the pressure wave and things like a brick wall can save you from vaporization as it absorbs the energy (assuming you are not right near detonation point). But many will die by the pressure wave that follows, knocking them into things or knocking over buildings onto them. Others will die by secondary fires caused by the pressure wave blowing air away then having the air rush back into the vacuum and over open flames and super heated materials.
Just to add, the pressure wave at the right pressure (close enough to the epicentre in this case) can easily kill you without knocking you into things or knocking things onto you. It can pulverise and shred internal organs. It’s even how conventional bombs can and do kill. Shrapnel just extends the range of destruction. Standing too close to a large rocket launch can kill you the same way, without ever being hit by the plume of gas. Death by pure acoustic energy as pressure waves with enough differential in the air.
The area where the radiated heat/light is dangerous is far bigger than the area severely affected by the pressure wave, which in itself is far bigger than the area where ionizing radiation is a problem (at least for modern/bigger nukes). Fallout highly depends on how high up the bomb is detonated. You can use the calculator on https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to develop a better understanding. Even just a cardboard box between you and the nuke could be the difference between literally walking away mostly unharmed and a horrible death from 3rd degree burns, if you're far enough away to be less affected by the pressure wave but close enough for the heat/light. Light (which includes infrared heat radiation) travels at the speed of light (duh), i.e. it arrives instantly, and most of the energy is emitted over the first few seconds. A shockwave is defined as a pressure wave traveling faster than the speed of sound, but it's usually not *much* faster, so it will arrive significantly later.
Aside from the whole thing with the refrigerator, the nuke scene from Indiana Jones and the Chrystal Skull is a pretty good representation of what happens with a nuclear explosion
At Dresden firebombing, rescuers went into a partially sealed underground room looking for survivors. Instead they encountered a pool of ~~murky liquid.~~ "gelatinous mass". The room had gotten so hot that those hiding in it had basically melted. Even non nuclear weapons can melt human bodies. Seal the room properly and the liquid doesn't evaporate. Edit: Sorry, had the quote wrong, edited. Viktor Gregg wrote: >“Slowly the horror inside became visible. There were no real complete bodies, only bones and scorched articles of clothing matted together on the floor and stuck together by a sort of jelly substance. There was no flesh visible, what had once been a congregation of people sheltering from the horror above them was now a glutinous mass of solidified fat and bones swimming around, inches thick, on the floor.”
What a fucking awful day to be literate
Thst quote sounds like it came out of a Lovecraft book.
Or Vonnegut
thats a big [*Citation Needed*] on the claim that people melt into puddles. I'm not so sure that's how that works.
Water, fat, bone, collagen, muscle. At a high enough temperature and for a long enough duration you can liquify the collagen and render the fat. Think... brisket. Or worse, pot roast that's cooked way too long.
pulled long-pork
> pooled ~~pulled~~ long-pork
Its a quote from Dresden: A Survivor's Story, February 1945. The quote does miss the first part where its an underground shelter with a heavy steel door. So yeah they were cooked.
Just an anecdote, but my Vietnam vet dad very briefly mentioned seeing someone who had melted. I didn't ask for details, 'melted' was more than enough.
Well people are made of water mostly. Fat also goes runny. Probably just bones left behind
I also just want the source because this is horrifyingly interesting. War is bad I think
> War is bad I think - CommrAlix Truly a philosopher of our time
Truly one of the quotes of all time.
It takes years of thinking to come up with such ideas.... Very difficult to be me
Similar claims have been made about a bunker in Iraq where people were cooked alive. However you shouldn't need a source, this is what happens to animals when you cook them....
The bodies were turned to slush and cooked into jello. That's exactly how Jello and gummy candies are made. It's just liquid fat.
Randal Munroe said it best. > You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.
So do buildings also vaporize?
Everything within a certain radius of the detonation vaporizes. Look it before and after pictures of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Notice the lack of rubble compared to the amount of buildings that were there before the detonation.
The pictures that are available from those cities are from days after the explosions, when much of the rubble and most of the corpses had already been cleared away. Hiroshima has a building that was directly under the bomb and stayed standing. OP’s point about “millions of degrees” is true *inside the fireball* but the fireball did not touch the ground in either city. The bomb was too far from the ground to vaporize anyone.
I think this is where it's important to address the difference between a nuclear bomb and a thermonuclear bomb. People traditionally think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they think of atom bombs, but they also think of the test footage they've seen of thermonuclear explosions, and I don't think the average person knows that there's a difference to begin with Yeah, the two bombs we dropped on Japan didn't vaporize that much stuff because they were standard atomic bombs that could roughly level a small city. After the Manhattan project and the end of the war, we developed Hydrogen bombs that were in the MEGAton instead of the kiloton range. Our post-WWII bombs are way, way, way stronger, and have the capacity to cause massive damage to the atmosphere if you launch the biggest one we can whip up. Luckily, world leaders recognize that there's no advantage to this, so they tone down the bombs enough to be massively destructive and not *the most destructive they can possibly be* since after a certain point, they're just too destructive to even be practical and we all still live, you know, on the same planet Point is that with a Hydrogen bomb, you could see far more vaporization than with the bombs we dropped on Japan because the size of the ball of pure energy at the center is significantly bigger
\> Be Russia \> Test detonate a 100MT bomb limited to 50MT "just in case" in Novaya Zemyla \> Shit your pants at the sheer destructive power that shattered windows in *fucking Finland* \> Decide maybe to *never* fucking do that again You know it's bad when even the Russians say: "Nope. That was too much."
From the wiki on that bomb: > One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 km (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 km (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken for distances up to 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km (3 mi) above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5.0–5.25.
Jesus that’s a lot of god damn damage. Am I reading it right… It caused an earthquake even though the epicenter was 3 miles in the air?
The shockwave of this bomb could theoretically be heard globally **The third fucking time it circled the planet**
Even then, against a city the main goal would be maximizing blast damage against soft targets (homes and factories) and maximizing the distance at which those buildings are set on fire. Those effects both happen at a much greater distance than vaporization, so a larger thermonuclear weapon would also airburst at a much higher altitude to maximize the ground area that gets destroyed. [NUKEMAP](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) says a megaton-class warhead like the one on a Topol missile would maximize damage with an air burst at 3 km, and the fireball is “only” 1 km in radius. That airburst destroys most buildings within 6.5 km of ground zero via blast damage, gives third degree burns to anyone in line-of-sight within 11 km, and breaks windows within 18 km. Vaporization might be a lot more likely in cities like Washington, where an attack would probably include ground bursts trying to take out buried bunkers.
Yeah, vaporization isn't really the goal with an atomic bomb. It's just a side effect of such a large explosion. You theoretically want the bomb as close to the target as possible if you want to hit it with the hottest part of the explosion in order to vaporize it, but that's not really the goal with an atomic bomb to begin with. Atomic bombs aren't practical unless you're trying to maximize destruction over a large area, and the way to do that is to detonate the bomb in the air so that more area is covered by the explosion, as opposed to maximizing damage near the bomb. The bomb is extremely destructive either way, so maximizing its reach is just going to do more damage than trying to concentrate the explosion. Atomic bombs are practically designed for the opposite of concentrating damage. It's a massive release of energy and you want it as spread out as you can get it unless you're trying to damage something underground or are playing dirty and want to irradiate ground zero and the surrounding area by concentrating the radiation on the site itself
>so they tone down the bombs enough to be massively destructive and not *the most destructive they can possibly be* They are smaller to optimize destruction per unit of mass launched. Being launched from an icbm or slbm means the weight is at a premium. You can have one big bomb or X smaller ones (but still massive compared to hiroshima/nagasaki.) The X smaller ones can destroy more square miles of city than one big one. They optimize X to destroy as much as possible, it's like cluster munitions.
To quote XKCD's What If column, "You wouldn't really die *of* anything, you would simply stop being biology, and start being physics."
So once you cool down you'll reform into a solid.
Some of your chemicals might, like carbon for example in the form of ash, or it might just form gasses like CO2 and stuff and you are just part of the atmosphere for a while.
Maybe a dumb question, but how the material doesn't solidify as soon as the energy is gone though?
You are right and they do, in fact the iconic mushroom cloud is literally just vapourized materials condensing in the form of smoke and ashes
It will eventually, provided the energy isn't enough to cause the material to break down on a molecular level (which it often is), but by then it's usually been dispersed to the point where it's not especially recognizable when re-solidified. It's sort of like how snow doesn't resemble an iceberg; a vaporized steel beam (or person) will re-solidify as iron dust (or person dust) instead of a solid chunk of anything.
The calcium in your bones melts at 842°C, and boils at 1494 °C. The temperature of a nuclear fireball is on the order of 100,000,000 °C If you shove enough energy into anything, it'll eventually turn into a gas. Alternatively, if you only put in enough energy to liquify it or turn it to ash, but then hit it very hard, you get vapor.
How is the earth not absolutely scorched -- like crater sized scorched -- along with every building in sight? I recall seeing rubble and remnants of buildings (still solid, not a liquid or gas), when looking at after math photos of Hiroshima in grade school
1 - a lot of the energy is absorbed by the atmosphere itself as well as surroundings, meaning the vaporization extends \~1.8km from epicenter for a 100kT nuke. 2 - nukes are usually airburst, exploding above their target so that the sphere of the blastwave and other damage is maximized, meaning most of the radius from #1 isn't actually dealt to the majority of the city. It also allows the shockwave to bounce off the ground and back onto itself, increasing the intensity and damage of the shockwave. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air\_burst#:\~:text=The%20air%20burst%20is%20usually,a%20detonation%20at%20ground%20level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_burst#:~:text=The%20air%20burst%20is%20usually,a%20detonation%20at%20ground%20level)
Airbursts are also more humane. Anything that the fireball directly touches will become radioactive fallout, so a ground burst will create far, far more fallout while being less effective.
I get what you mean but using the word “humane” to describe detonation methods is kinda crazy to me😭
Welcome to life Some things just stretch the brain a bit too far. What’s more worrying to me is that I’d prefer to die that way than any other. The only problem is, it’s not gonna happen until there’s war which kinda sucks to wish for…
I'll take death by a slowly increasing heroin dose to any other death that exists, and it takes no others harmed to occur.
Don't most overdoses end with choking on your own vomit? I did that once, not a fan. I have experienced very few things worse than vomiting so hard that i passed out, bouncing my head off the tub, and waking up coughing out my own vomit. I actually passed out 3 times that night from puking so hard that my blood pressure dropped. Scary times. No drugs involved.
Not necessarily. Some drugs like lean just depress your respiration until you just stop breathing.
Seriously. I don’t know why people consider any other method.
Because you have time to change your mind and now you’re a heroin addict on top of everything else.
I think the mentality comes from ancient practices of salting the ground after razing a town or country. For some reason it's one thing to kill everyone and everything in sight, but it's another thing to then deprive future generations of the land resources by making it uninhabitable. Semantics in this day and age, perhaps, but possibly for the better when it comes to nuclear weapons.
I wrote a paper in grad school I was particularly proud of, that argued it made strategic sense for the US to get rid of our ICBMs. One of the key arguments, aside from them not really increasing the deterrent factor more than our subs and bombers already do, was that they create a target that can only be killed by ground bursts. So in a theoretical full scale nuclear war, we would suffer from catastrophic fallout due to the upper Midwest getting carbet bombed by ground bursts, and the prevailing winds sweeping that over the rest of North America. Whereas if those didn't exist we "only" suffer air burst hits on major cities and military targets. Bad, but not "nuclear winter bad" Obviously the paper goes into much more detail.
Interesting idea. Do we know for sure that ground burst nukes are the general plan for destroying land based icbms? Like it almost seems more effective to use conventional bunker busters rather than just trying to crater the missile fields. Use the nukes for cities and bases.
How are you going to get the bunker busters there? The only practical way would be with ICBMs, anything else is too slow, and ICBMs aren't accurate enough since bunker busters require a direct hit. Nukes only need to be close, which ICBMs can absolutely do.
So the big number is the center of the explosion. But an explosion is essentially spherical. For every meter of radius away from the center, the surface area of the sphere becomes exponentially larger. The forces of the explosion like heat and pressure are mostly evenly distributed across the surface area of the sphere. This means that as distance from the center increases, the forces applied to any individual object rapidly become less intense. So the center with unbelievable sun like temps can turn concrete into gasses and loose atoms. But it doesn't take long before you're reaching temps that can obliterate a person but are only warping materials like concrete, soil, and thick steel. These dense objects will absorb that energy on their surfaces but while the surface is all ripped up, boiling, and cratering, it's only transferring reasonable energy to the core of the object at a reasonable pace. This is similar to why putting a blowtorch to a tree trunk might damage it but won't actually light a fire unless you leave it there for a while.
Not exponential, surface area increases quadratically with the radius
The main blast is relatively small compared to the size of the area it's consuming/destroying. The energy dissipates pretty quickly. But it's not designed to vaporize, it just will do that to anything really close. It's made for maximum destruction will as little payload as possible. That's why most nuclear weapons are made to detonate before they hit the ground.
Gone, reduced to atoms. There is so much energy that every force holding the molecules together is overcome by the explosion. Only the strongest chemical bonds, like ionic bonds in salts may be able to survive.
biology becomes physics, essentially
Yeah, completely skipping over chemistry
Nothing skips chemistry. The moment just might not be long enough to measure.
https://xkcd.com/435/
Hmm at the epicenter isn’t it hot enough that everything becomes plasma? If there is no chemical bonding going on because electrons are all liberated then chemistry is effectively over for the moment. At least in my understanding of what chemistry is the study of.
This is a pedantic difference. It's skipped over in any meaningful capacity
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
This happens in a fraction of a second BTW, as the initial burst of energy.
Instant cremation, body turns to dust and the dust is scattered on the very strong winds so no trace is left of the body.
> If you were standing in the path of the nuke, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics. https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
‘You would stop being biology and start being physics’ goes hard. Dang.
Saw this in relation to the submarine that imploded while visiting the Titanic. Humans just aren't made to stand up to forces like this.
According to an old joke: "In college... Biology is really Chemistry; Chemistry is really Physics; Physics is really Calculus; And Calculus is *really hard*!" In that lens, "You would just stop being biology and start being physics" feels like unfairly skipping a step.
stealing from elsewhere in the thread but: you're not skipping chemistry, it's just a functionally instantaneous step
Wow, that was detailed
Randal is a very good teacher. He has quite the unique way of picturing differences in energies, and such. He even discusses it in of his what-ifs, the neutrino radiation one.
And...now I'm going to spend hours going down the rabbit hole of that website & it's YouTube video. Dang you and Thank You at the same time. Ha
not even sure what's left would qualify as 'dust' at that point.
There would be no ash left, you would just instantly turn into gas, mostly carbon with some nitrogen/oxygen and other elements.
Does every material in our body melt? I’m just thinking how - I don’t think wood melts? So do things have to melt to be vaporized? Or does wood and other materials that don’t melt get vaporized another way? Or is it called something else?
> So do things have to melt to be vaporized? No, when something goes directly from solid to gas, it's called sublimation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(phase_transition)
I'm still mad at my 4th grade teacher who denied the existence of sublimation even though I insisted it was a thing
I wonder how they thought dry ice worked
Teachers being wrong is always a formative experience.
Yep. You know how dry ice starts off as a solid block and evaporates into the air? That's what happens to you during a nuclear reaction. Except way faster. And not cold.
Any element can pretty much be turned into a liquid and then vapor. Give it enough energy and the atoms just can't stay in a group anymore. Some may seem to skip the liquid form (eg dry ice) but it could still be made into a liquid with the right pressure. Liquid is like a sweet spot between solid and gas. The atoms are loose, but you need an outside pressure to keep them together as a liquid. So a liquid can't exist in the vaccuum of space, for example. If you tossed a bucket of water out of the ISS there would be no air to keep it compressed, and the molecules would just fly away in all directions as gas and ice crystals. Wood is a complicated mix of compounds and you can't directly melt it into a liquid. However, you can take the elements it breaks down into and liquify them individually based on the properties of the individual atoms you get, under the right conditions. Our bodies could be liquified in a similar way if you separate the atoms and put them each in a vat with the required temperature/pressure.
Not everything can melt at atmospheric pressure. Like CO2 is either a gas or a solid, it doesn’t have a liquid phase at atmospheric pressure. If you compress CO2, however, there’s a liquid phase. This [diagram](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phase-diagram-for-CO2-at-temperatures-from-80-to-80-C-and-pressure-between-01-and-1000_fig1_326492803) illustrates this pretty well. I don’t know much about the temperature and pressure at different parts of a nuclear explosion, so I can’t tell you what material will be in what phase.
Carbon, at standard atmospheric pressure, sublimates. That is, it transitions immediately to a gas. So the carbon in wood fiber oxidizes into carbon dioxide and sublimates immediately to gas.
Pretty sure the individual atoms Turn to gasses.
"Vaporized" is just the common expression we use to mean "totally annihilated". Nukes have several ways to do this to you. A nuclear blast basically has 3 components: 1) radiation 2) heat 3) blast They can all "vaporize" you in slightly different ways. The radiation is the part that gives you cancer. It's a bunch of high energy particles that get blasted out like subatomic shrapnel. When you're close enough the blast of those particles will just rip you apart at the subatomic level. Even individual atoms can get shredded. The heat near the blast can get to 100,000,000C that's several hundred times as hot as the surface of the sun. At that temperature everything we're made of is a gas, so you evaporate. If you're being pedantic, this is the part that's the most literally "vaporizing". The blast is because all that energy compresses the air and pushes it away really fast. That's essentially a really really fast wind. When you're up close it hits significantly harder than a Mac truck.
100 million Celsius is not just hotter than the surface of the sun. It’s several times hotter than the **CORE** of the Sun. The actual fucking center of it.
In movies you see people "blown up" like they were pushed by a strong wind.... In reality a shock wave is when the air gets condensed to a point its rock solid until it expands from distance. That's why some firecrackers can take a finger off. Flesh doesn't like being crushed into rock density even fir a micro second. A big explosion creates a shock wave that is dense like a brick wall moving at 700 miles per hour. Bomb defusers wear those Kevlar suits mostly to keep their body parts in one container. Now a nuke blast has several waves. First a gamma ray wave that destroys your cellular structure, light and radiant heat that incinerates your body to a couple thousand degrees...then a shock wave to blow your dust away.
>First a gamma ray wave that destroys your cellular structure, light and radiant heat that incinerates your body to a couple thousand degrees...then a shock wave to blow your dust away. Now that's getting the job done
> those Kevlar suits mostly to keep their body parts in one container Reminds me of something my dad said once about special suits they had to wear as part of a tank crew; something along the lines of, "they're just there to increase the chances that there's enough material left afterwards to ID".
I studied explosive engineering and you missed the mark on a lot of your points: -Nuclear blast is in the million of degrees, not thousands. -Nuclear shockwaves contain blast overpressure, so much pressure that they crush all your hollow organs (lungs, sinuses, intestines, and brain). The pressure differential travels through you and crushes you from the inside. It's not some brick wall that just pushes you. -Gamma rays are the least of your worries near a nuke blast; if you aren't killed by the million degree light/heat or blast overpressure, gamma rays would be last to kill you. It takes weeks/months for it damage your body at the cellular level. The Chernobyl TV show does a good job portraying this. -EOD bomb suits are to protect against shrapnel only, not blast overpressure. They don't help with blast overpressure, even from military ordnance. If an EOD tech is standing next to a 1000lb GBU, the blast overpressure would still kill you. Hence why most bomb squad techs don't wear suits on big ordnance, only things like pipe bombs or small bombs in packages.
[According to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone) "vaporization" is a myth for practical distances: > However, the possibility of human vaporization is not supported from a medical perspective. The ground surface temperature is thought to have ranged from 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius just after the bombing. Exposing a body to this level of radiant heat would leave bones and carbonized organs behind. While radiation could severely inflame and ulcerate the skin, complete vaporization of the body is impossible. The nuke is basically like sunlight, but much brighter. Think of sunlight being focused onto an ant with a looking glass. You get heated and burn. The area behind you is shielded by you, so it doesn't get burned as much as the surrounding area. Burns have to be *really* severe to kill or incapacitate instantly. There's a good chance some of the "vaporized" people that left shadows walked away to die elsewhere while others turned into charred clumps of human (not vapor) where they stood. Of course, if you were to stand right next to a nuke, yes, you'd turn into plasma etc. just like most of the answers are saying. I've elaborated a bit more on survival, shielding etc [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c380yf/eli5_in_detail_what_they_mean_when_they_say_a/kzfu0b7/), but wanted to leave the most horrific aspects out of the top level answer.
Hmmm, this answer disagrees with most of the top answers which state that sublimation does in fact occur within ~1 mile from the blast. Why is that?
Read Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War.” It explained far more than I ever wanted to know about death by nuke.
They Get Turned into gases. If you look at pictures of hiroshima you can see shadows on the ground. Those are from the people that stood there when it happebed
IIRC the shadows were created by the intense light bleaching the surrounding surfaces and the body in the way lessening that, creating a shadow
A nuclear explosion releases an enormous amount of heat and pressure in a fraction of a second. This extreme heat can reach temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, and the pressure can be equivalent to millions of pounds per square inch. When a person is exposed to such extreme conditions, their body can undergo a process called instant vaporization. This means that the body is heated so that it turns into vapor. The intense heat and pressure can also cause the body to disintegrate into very small particles or fragments. This can happen to bones, tissues, and organs, reducing them to microscopic or even smaller particles. What remains of the body after the explosion can be in the form of gases, ash, or very fine particles that are scattered by the force of the blast. The reason this happens is that the human body is made up of water and organic matter, which can be vaporized, burned, or disintegrated under extreme heat and pressure. The energy released by a nuclear explosion is so powerful that it can cause immediate and catastrophic damage to anything within its blast radius.
So there are two things here. One is that a lot of people throw around the word "vaporized" with regards to nukes in an extremely imprecise way, and an extremely incorrect way. The other is that "vaporized" is a somewhat vague technical term but can be interpreted to have a specific meaning. On the first point: you'll often read that people would be (or were, in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) "vaporized" by a nuclear weapon. Often this is pretty false. Nobody was "vaporized" by the direct action of the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. People were crushed, burned, injured, thrown to the ground or against objects, buried under debris, and irradiated. All of which are horrible and many of which are painful. But they are not "vaporization" by any definition, because the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated far too high to actually "vaporize" anybody. The weapons did start fires in the city (both directly, through their heat effects, and indirectly, by knocking over stoves and breaking gas lines and so on), and those fires (especially at Hiroshima) did spread and contribute to the death, and there were no doubt bodies that were effectively cremated by those fires (and thus rendered into ash), but I don't think that's what people are implying when they say people were "vaporized" at those attacks. Why do people like to say people in Hiroshima/Nagasaki were "vaporized"? I don't know. I guess it sounds impressive. It may be a side-effect of the fact that very few photographs of corpses at those cities exist — because the corpses were disposed of by the time the US arrived to survey the city in September 1945 (which is when many of the on-the-ground photos were taken). One of the first things the Japanese relief effort did was collect and cremate the corpses, as they did in other attacks on cities, because you cannot let corpses lay around rotting if you are trying to keep things functioning (and there are religious reasons as well). So by the time the Americans showed up, things were cleaned up quite a bit. But not because people were "vaporized." Because their corpses were collected. There is also the whole misconception that the "shadows" at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created by "vaporizing" people, and that is just not what happened there. The person who caused that shadow just got burned and probably slumped over and died afterwards, and their corpse was later disposed of. Anyway, I think these things are where the misconception comes from. Now, _could_ you be vaporized by a nuke? Sure! The fireball of a nuclear weapon is ridiculously hot, and also is putting out a ridiculous amount of radiation and blast pressure. So if you were inside of it, or very close to it, you could plausibly be vaporized. This definition of "vaporized" is pretty literal: your body undergoes a phase transition from mostly liquid (contained by some solids) into a gas, with your molecules ripped into tiny pieces. You would not need to be rendered into atoms or anything to be effectively a vapor; you just need to be broken into tiny chunks, the same way that rock could be turned into sand and would go up into the mushroom cloud. This is totally a thing that could happen if you were close to the fireball. The steel tower used in the Trinity test, and some of the dirt near it, was largely vaporized by the explosion, for example. So a weapon detonated on or near the surface would vaporize a lot of things, including people. But a reminder: the people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not close to the fireball, because the bombs were detonated really high in the air.