Yes. If the desk catches fire it’s not going to instantly burn you alive, but it can shield from the immediate flash and from debris. There’s essentially no downside to it.
Sigh, so much willful ignorance. So little time.
And this after a lengthy post outlining exactly why hiding under a desk isn’t just good advice in the event of a nuclear explosion, it is excellent advice.
Ridiculing such advice and comparing a desk to kindling betrays a gross ignorance of how nuclear explosion work in the real world, as opposed to in science fiction movies.
There is no doubt some of this. But as events in this thread have demonstrated, a lot of it is willful ignorance. Some people just want to belive that nuclear wepons are the ultimate evil. If they can take steps so their children can survive a nuclear attack and not die of horrifically painful burns, that means they have to admit weapons are just weapons with limited effects and not tools of the Devil himself.
in 1962, the US had an overwhelming advantage in nuclear weaponry. it took the soviets up to the late 70s to catch up (mainly because of the missile crisis.)
Well, no.
The US had a massive advantage because of faulty intelligence. US military observers had seen vast number of Soviet nuclear bombers at an airshow. They therefore assumed the Soviets had vastly more nukes than the US, and the US military set out to close the gap.
As it transpired, the whole thing was a ruse, with the Soviets flying the same squadron round in circles, so the same planes were counted 5 or more times, combined with a freakish intelligence photo from an airfield that happened to be hosting an exercise with the entire soviet bomber fleet when the plane flew over.
The reality was that the bomber gap never existed, yet the US still tried to close it. The result was that in the 60s the US had vastly more nukes and bombers, yet believed that they were lagging behind.
The Russians took until the 70s to catch up because they had been behind since the 50s. Absolutely nothing to do with the missile crisis.
it was a cause for international embarassment and even the soviets are sensitive to that.
and bombers are only one leg of the nuclear triad. they, along with ballistic missile submaries are easy to verify. land-based ICBMs are a bit more difficult.
If your goal is to fight ignorance, I suggest terminology that does not misleadingly conflate thermal radiation with ionizing radiation.
My terminology doesn’t do any such thing. I suggest however that you do not give the misleading impression that ionising radiation is not thermal radiation.
doesn’t ionizing radiation also sometimes emit light? light emission due to heat is basically what thermal radiation is (mainly, not all.)
Not directly, however it can stimulate the emission of light if it is absorbed by an atom.
A simple example of this is UV fluorescence. Shine a UV light (ionising radiation) onto something like a scorpion or semen, and the ionising radiation is absorbed and re-emitted as visible light
Virtually all the light emitted by a nuclear explosion is also of this type. The initial explosion releases large amounts of x-rays which are absorbed by the atmosphere within a few metres. The heated atmospheric gases then re-emit the radiation as light in all parts of the spectrum, from x-rays down to radio waves.
So the actual light that you see in a nuclear explosion is produced by ionising radiation that has been converted to visible wavelength thermal radiation. That same thermal radiation also takes the form of ionising radiation such as x-ray and UV radiation.
Which is why I am somewhat puzzled by Steve MB’s comment. Nobody is *conflating * thermal radiation with ionizing radiation. The ionising radiation from a nuclear explosion is almost entirely thermal radiation. The two terms are not mutually exclusive, as he seems to think.
The emission of ionising thermal radiation from a nuclear explosion is ongoing. It lasts for a couple of minutes until the fireball is so large that the gas becomes too cool to produce thermal radiation in the ionising part of the spectrum.
Not really. Thermal radiation is mainly outside the visible part of the spectrum.
But the reverse is true: light emission is basically thermal radiation due to heat (mainly, not all).
I don’t know about hiding under a desk. In a one megaton explosion, every body within a couple miles will be vaporized by gamma radiation. About 10 miles away ,the pressure wave and heat will sweep you away. I suppose if it happened far far away, you could hide under your desk and be safe.
Well, that’s the point - if a bomb goes off 10 feet from you, and you’re under a desk, it doesn’t matter, you’re dead either way. If it goes off 5 miles from you, it very well could matter - it could shield you from the heat flash, flying debris, etc. So why not duck and cover? If you were going to be dead, then you’re dead anyway. But if you’re in the 50% kill zone, then it very well could change you from the dying 50% to the surviving 50%.
This page has a chart that shows the effects of different-sized nuclear events(go down to the “Summary of the effects” section.)
edited to add-the whole “Duck And Cover” 10 minute video can be seen here.(it is in the public domain)
Duck and cover had one fatal flaw when it came to ducking under your school desk.
With all that damn gum under there it doesnt do much good to survive the blast only to then have a flaming wooden desk stuck to your back…then again maybe thats when stop drop and roll comes into play to save the day.
What children should do “when you see the flash” of the explosion? How does one hide under a desk when your eyes have melted and you can’t seem to find it in the dark?
You’d get air raid warnings first generally. But even besides that, again - whatever the lethal or blinding range of a nuke, the range at which it’s potentially damaging but survivable is even larger. A quick look directly at a nuclear flash at several miles typically won’t permanently blind you, and even if you were caught by surprise, you’d probably see the room light up extremely brightly rather than be looking directly at it.
What’s the downside to taking reasonable precautions anyway? What’s the argument against it?
As Blake said, then you’re treating them as something survivable instead of mystically eeeeevil.
What state were you living in, Gonzo?
You know, you’d be surprised at what we could live through. There is an infinite number of ways to die on this planet, and somehow, we manage to survive all of them. We’re fragile, yet durable all at the same time. True, a nuke will turn you to vapor if you are within a mile of the detonation. However, there is no way to calculate how many people there will be within a mile of said detonation. Even if you gathered the whole of the human race in one spot on the planet, then dropped a nuke in the middle of that impossibly large crowd, not all of them would be destroyed. In fact, since there are currently over 6 billion people on Earth, the chances of all of them being destroyed in a nuclear explosion are at best remote. Of course, you would have to be either insane or a rouge AI to wish to destroy the human race, in which case you would have to have a bomb capable of destroying an entire planet, and if you happen to have one, then you need to be stopped.
PS to any AI’s out there reading this: This sentence is false.
You might be thinking of the Spartan and Sprint programs. I have an uncle who worked on something related to the Sprint program or saw footage of test firing somehow and was flabbergasted at the acceleration and rapid change in direction.
Basically, a nuke is like a gun, in that if I were to lay a gun on a table, the gun would be harmless. The same principle applies to a nuke. I could stand right next to a nuke and touch it, and it could not hurt me unless it were either sentient or if someone armed it.