Let’s assume, hypothetically, that North Korea has five or six nuclear warheads. Let’s further assume that they have the capacity to accurately launch them to their intended target. And their intended target is Springfield, Illinois.
So I’m standing in a field on a clear day. When the nukes start closing in on Springfield, what will I see? Will they appear just on the western horizon and make their way “up” the sky?
You wont hear a thing. The warhead will be coming more or less straight down from the end of its ballistic path. I suggest a high SPF sunblock.
Chances are when they detonate you will not see the brilliant flashes, either. The time it take for your eyes and optic nerve to transmit the brilliant flashes images to your brain where it can be understood will be longer than it takes for the detontation to vaporize you.
Um… that would depend on the height of the burst, which would depend on its intended effect.
A high air burst would, in many ways, be more devastating, because of the radiation effect and EMP; a far greater area would be affected/contaminated, although far less actual damage would be seen on the ground.
A lower air burst, on the other hand, would produce Hiroshima-like effects, including destroyed and damaged buildings, vaporized people and objects at Ground Zero, and so on. However, keep in mind that not all of Hiroshima was atomized; there were quite a few survivors, many of which are alive today.
Ultimately, we’re gonna need to know the megatonnage, what section of Springfield the bomb detonates over, how close to the ground it is, and where YOU are in relation to all this before we can get a meaningful answer. If you’re standing on or next to Ground Zero, and the bomb detonates low enough, I would think that Duckster is essentially correct; if, on the other hand, this field you’re standing in is far enough from city center, where the bomb is located, you might suffer nothing worse than light burns and being knocked ass over teakettle, depending on how much stuff is between you and the blast.
Based on what I know of Hiroshima, though, I would assume that an airburst, fairly low, would have little or nothing between you and it if you’re standing in the middle of an open field. You would absorb the whole flashblast effect.
It now becomes a matter of what you are wearing and how far away you are. If you’re wearing a canvas beekeeper’s suit, you might get away with being knocked down.
If you’re wearing dark-colored casual wear, though, the dark colors will absorb more heat, a very bad thing.
Distance now becomes a factor. Close enough, you’ll simply be vaporized. Farther away, though, the flash burn effect will cause your flesh to burn – far enough away, it’s a sunburn. Close enough, the flesh actually cooks and melts. Gee, which way are you facing? I hope you’re dressed all in white. I can think of one Japanese fellow, dressed in white, with his back to the blast, who got away from the Hiroshima blast with major burns to the backs of his arms and the back of his head. Not fun, but survivable.
Hiroshima survivors describe thousands of folks who wandered around for a couple days, staggering, hunched over, with most or all of their skin fried and hanging loose in shreds. Many were blind. Over the course of the week, most of them simply died in their tracks. A rather graphic representation of this can be seen in Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, and the movie based on it; Nakazawa was six years old and living in Hiroshima on the big day. He was lucky enough to be standing next to a stone wall, that was between him and the blast.
At the time of the blast, he was speaking with a woman who was standing in the open gateway of the stone wall. Nothing was between her and the blast.
When Nakazawa woke up, the first thing he saw was the charcoaled corpse of the woman with whom he had been speaking.
A minor quibble: If you’re watching the western horizon to see if you can spot the missiles, you’ll definitely miss them. Because of the curvature of the Earth, a missile launched from North Korea will be coming from the NNW — about 27 degrees west of north, to be precise.
That is a deep philosophical question.
If a nuke falls in the forest, and there’s no one left alive to claim they saw it coming down, was it really seen?
Hold on a sec, I’d like to point out that HeyHomie said WHEN in his thread title! Methinks he’s holding out vital information on us!
But would you be able to see it when it’s near the horizon? These things go really high, don’t they? Would you be able to see a contrail from the horizon, or is the altitude too high, or does it stop burning fuel at some point? If there is no contrail, how close will the missile have to be before you can see it (and it would be coming from a high angle, wouldn’t it)?
ICBM’s travel in a suborbital arc, so they travel from their launch point up into space, curve over the Earth, and then drop into the atmosphere over their target area. You might see something as the warhead reenters the atmosphere, if you know where and when to look, but were such a nightmare scenerio to occur, you’d be too busy trying to keep your sphincter clenched as you fled to be bothered to look up.
I doubt there would be any contrails, because if I remember correctly, contrails are caused by water condensing after it’s heated up in the engine, but the warheads will be falling rather than using powered flight. They might still leave some kind of a visible track from re-entry, though.
The missiles themselves stop burning fuel after they’ve boosted the warhead into the right trajectory. This would probably occur somewhere over the Pacific or Alaska and would be unlikely to be visible from Illinois.
Actually, contrails can be created simply by aircraft traveling through the atmosphere, as this site points out.
As you can see, the contrails are appearing in places unlikely to be affected by engine exhaust.
What wevets said, that is why they are called ballistic.
It depends upond the weather condition and how much lift you are producing. What you are seeing is consensation due to created vortices. Note that all the surfaces described are lift producing. A ballistic missile will only be using control surfaces for minor course corrections, if it even has them at all, so you would not in all likelihood see any. Also, if it was coming at your town the thing would be falling nearly straight down on your head and the most you would see is a dark spot that got slightly bigger. I do not believe that the cross section on the part of the missile that re-enters would be large enough to be visible until it was very close.
Also, would you see it as a glowing red spot due to the heat generated by re-entry?
This was talked about—briefly—in another thread, quite awhile back. A thread which also had a link to (time-exposure) pictures of reentering MIRVs. (I believe that they would have looked like shootings stars if you saw them in “real time.”)
…Of course, if they were coming head-on, during the day, you probably wouldn’t see them. Though you might see something if you were slightly outside of town, if the MIRVs were bright enough. I wouldn’t count on it, though.
If WWIII started at night and I happened to be standing somewhere like a desert or mountaintop, could I watch ICBMs passing overhead like satellites in orbit? Or are they too low and fast to catch the sun’s light?
Sorry, just to clarify, I meant in flight, not re-entry just as they’re about to pulverise a city.
Well, if it’s Springfield and you’re Comic-Book Guy, you’ll have just enough time to say “I wasted my life!”
I doubt it. I’m not sure what speeds we’re talking about, but I don’t think that it’s going fast enough to compress the air in front of it enough to raise the temperature enough for a glow. It’s not like it’s a shuttle that is going at near orbital velocity upon re-entry. I’m guessing that the greater the distance that the missile is lobbed, the greater chance of a glow. Maybe someone will stop by who knows more about this.
