The title says it all but basically I am asking if a nuke were dropped on Irkutsk or Seattle, how long would it be before people could safely re-inhabit the areas?
The actual details of weapon type, burst altitude, prevailing winds, underlying strata irradiated in a ground burst. . . and a bunch of other factors make it silly to predict.
Fallout shelter managers use a 7/10 rule. each seven fold increase in time provides a 10 fold decrease in dose rate. e.g. Peak radiation level one hour after the blast. Seven hours later, most level areas will have 10% of the peak dose rate. Two days later, 1%. Two weeks after that, 0.1%. With a “clean” bomb, and an Air burst, you get to begin foraging out from your shelter then, sending the old women first. (They are least vulnerable to long term effects, other than mutation of germ tissue, which they are unlikely to use.) Trips of an hour a day to find needed supplies, and bring back small loads. The old men come out after those are located, to do the heavy lifting. Young women and children remain in the shelter for three more months, and then, if possible move to less affected areas.
This plan is, based on the Massive First Strike model, where you can’t be sure of any outside help. In a more forgiving scenario, you can evacuate to a clear area in well shielded vehicles in seven hours, counting on very rapid transit out of the zone. Of course you get stripped, shaved, and hosed down a few times, dosed with crap, and isolated. You are at risk of cancer for the rest of your life.
Also, stream beds, sewer junctions, ditches, and low lying areas will remain more highly radio-active for years.
Now, if the bomb is salted with cobalt, or iodine, or just set off in a shallow gypsum pit mine, those numbers get inflated by factors of 5 or a thousand.
If the bomb hits a nuclear plant, or nuclear waste disposal site, it becomes geologic in timescale, and not a brief event, even on those levels.
Tris
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited now, so it’s certainly less than 60 years. How much less, I’m not sure: I don’t know when re-settling started.
One may object that those were lower-tech bombs, but modern bombs, unless specifically designed for high fallout, are actually cleaner than those used on Japan. Basically, a lot of the fallout is from what you might call “unburnt fuel”, and modern bombs burn their fuel more efficiently.
Doesn’t a factual answer on this require a size of the actual nuke used? Plus, land, air, launched from a sub? Where does it hit? Just one nuke no retaliation strike/s?
Japan passed a Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law in 1949 and reconstruction started in 1950. So about 5 years.
The question in the OP is too vague to answer very effectively. It’s like asking if a city were bombed, how much would be destroyed.
Wait. Old women are the ones least affected by radiation? Wow. Never would have guessed.
Low doses of radiation (from weak sources or short exposures) are most likely to cause harm by either killing a cell outright (which is not a big deal, unless you lose a lot of them) or by mutating a cell, which goes on to either die (the most likely scenario) or become cancerous (rare, but if you get enough cells mutated, it can happen). However, a small mutation in a an egg or sperm cell is often disastrous for any fetus produced by that cell, so you try to keep young women protected, because they’re still likely to reproduce and have all their eggs already on board, so to speak.
Another major danger comes from fallout, which can be ingested and remain inside your body, continuing to irradiate you. This doesn’t provide much risk to an older person, because they’re probably already going to die from natural causes before the added risk from irradiation can build up. Young people will continue to receive radiation from that fallout for decades, though, which increases the likelihood of cancer, and again, irradiating those germ cells.
So it’s not that old women are somehow protected from radiation, it’s that the stakes are lower, because they’re unlikely to reproduce (being post-menopausal) and old enough that they’re more likely to die from natural causes before radiation-generated cancer can set in.
An Gadai–there are other ways of settling quarrles with your next door neighbor, & you cannot solve your cockroach problem by these means.:D:p
That was the beginning of major reconstruction of the city, but I don’t believe that the city’s population was ever evacuated.
However, people had been living continuously in the ruins from immediately after the bombing. By the end of 1945 you had a permanent population living in huts in the centre, many streets had been cleared, the water supply had been restored and a municiple administration installed in partially damaged building. Much of this was in the face of official disapproval, but that was partly because the planners of the reconstruction were envisaging a “blank canvas” and saw such repopulation as a future obstacle. The 1950 date is more about the delays in the official reconstruction plans than what people were doing out of necessity on the ground.
The city’s website has a history, while Robert Jungk’s old Children of the Ashes can be especially recommended as a portrait of what happened in the city in the years afterwards.
Note that the residual radiation in the two cities was already found to be minimal when the first US observers reached them in early September. All the already stated caveats about the circumstances of use obviously apply.
Apologies that my OP was too vague.
Essentially what I’m trying to find out is whether long lasting radiation “hot zones” that were fatal (either immediately or within say months) would exist after a nuclear war. Nuclear war fiction often has references to hot zones, forbidden zones but would such areas be likely to exist after, for example, a full scale nuclear war between the US and Russia? Fictionalised accounts (and IIRC governmental guidelines) refer to a two week period wherein fallout should be avoided but how much danger would exist after this period?
Again, assume a full scale nuclear war, not a single incident.
Interesting topic. I’ve heard that if Three Mile Island had been a total meltdown (or whatever the Worst Thing Possible was) that the whole east coast of the U.S. would be a radioactive wasteland for thousands of years.
But the OP posits a good scenario and I believe that if I restate correctly, then what would be of the family in East Rural Bumscrew, WV that emerges from its well-built fallout shelter two weeks after the initial strike? Do they live otherwise healthy and happy lives? Their kids? Their kids’ kids?
Nuclear reactor accidents release very different radioactive substances vs. nuclear explosions.
If the US & Russia went at it full blast, but avoided directly uprooting each other’s nuclear power plants, then, as descibed by the others above, radiation levels would be down to short-term survival levels within 2 weeks. Some spots would be hotter than others, but most land, even that which had a good dose at minute 1 would be OK-ish. A month later things’d be even better.
You’d have some elevated rate of long-term cancer in the immediate survivors. So for example, instead of 15% of the kids exposed dying of cancer some time after after age 70, it might be be 25%. It wouldn’t be 95%.
Instead of 1 in 500 kids being born with birth defects, it’d be 1 in 250. And the next generation would be normal.
Of the people still alive to emerge fom their shelters after 2-4 weeks, the key obstacle to both near- & long-term survival would be finding enough to eat, not avoiding radiation.
Radiation zombies, people with two heads, widespread mutations, and long-term hot zones are all fiction. The last of these is not fiction, IF sombody blows up a nuclear powerplant and spreads the mess some distance. Witness Chernobyl.
No. Old women are the ones whose ability to benefit the group is compromised at a rate which limits their overall benefit to the survival of the group the group the least. Fallout shelter management isn’t a nice science.
Tris
After about a year, the biggest radiation hazard would not be whole-body radiation exposure from the surrounding environment but the uptake and storage of radioactive isotopes like Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. I don’t know of any preventative for strontium-90 but medical grade Prussian Blue can be used to bind to ingested cesium and help remove it from the body.
Wow, so we should probably eat them first too? That is just putting me off my feed.
This nuclear war thing is sounding more and more like a bad idea.
What happened at Three Mile Island was in fact a worst case scenario for that design of reactor. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Chernobyl, but the design of Chernobyl would be best described as insanely idiotically asinine.
Well, mutation is possibly not the right word for it, but a robot brought back mushrooms growing inside Chernobyl’s reactor that have evolved to feed off the hot radiation in there, essentially doing a kind of “photosynthesis” from gamma rays.
It’s wicked cool, extremely Fallout-y and a testament to the fact that, however we may mess the planet up, life will just adapt and go on.
It’s worth noting that a lot of popular understanding of nuclear fallout probably comes from the Cold War discussions about cobalt-salting hydrogen bombs specifically to cause long-term radiation damage.
I don’t think even the rationale of cold warfare made it desirable to affect people in the enemy’s territory thousands of years into the future. Originally Leo Szilard described the possibility as a thought experiment to emphasize the possible large-scale dangers of nuclear weapons. Discussion of the possibility of cobalt-salting continued because people were fascinated by the horrific possibility of intentionally destroying the earth’s habitability; it may also have had some warped Cold War appeal as a “deterrent.”
I once read that as few as 18 large cobalt-salted hydrogen bombs, properly placed with regard to prevailing winds, could render the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable.
It’s unclear if any cobalt-salted weapons were ever actually built. Let’s hope not.
I thought that cobalt would result in intense mid-term (5-20 years) fallout, not uninhabitability on the order of centuries. IOW, it was specifically intended to increase the amount of radiation mid-term at the expense of long-term lingering radiation.
In any event, the Wiki page on nuclear weapons design claims that although salted weapons might yield proportionally more mid-term fallout, the standard U-238 cladding used in multistage thermonuclear designs yields more total fallout per bomb by increasing the power of the device. In other words, salting is a waste of potential.