How much can a nuke wipe out?
A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city and kill most of its people. Several nuclear explosions over modern cities would kill tens of millions of people. Casualties from a major nuclear war between the US and Russia would reach hundreds of millions.
Death, starvation, radiation poisoning, and 3rd-degree burns
A single nuclear weapon can easily wipe out an entire city, Kathryn Higley, a professor of nuclear science at Oregon State University, told Insider.
How many nuclear bomb can destroy the world? A 1 Megatonne warhead would destroy everything in a 140 square km area from ground zero. There is a total approx 148,326,000 square km of land on Earth. You'd need aproximately 1,059,471 x 1 Megatonne warheads to utterly destroy everything on land.
According to the 2023 UN State of World Population report, the current world population is 8 billion — detonating about 400 atomic bombs would wipe out humanity, and there would be no life on earth for a long time.
In a typical air burst, where the blast range is maximized to produce the greatest range of severe damage, i.e. the greatest range that ~10 psi (69 kPa) of pressure is extended over, is a GR/ground range of 0.4 km for 1 kiloton (kt) of TNT yield; 1.9 km for 100 kt; and 8.6 km for 10 megatons (Mt) of TNT.
In short, the total available resources on our planet would plummet, and the loss of human life would be staggering. Scientists estimate losses counted in the billions. There isn't a nuclear bomb on Earth that could actually destroy the world, but they could destroy the world as we know it.
You'd need 290,000x 100 kilotonne Nuclear warheads to physically destroy the US by raw damage and not radiation coverage. That's 290,000 Warheads aimed to detonate evenly to maximise area coverage and cover the entire US landmass. The largest Nuke ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba at 50 Megatonnes.
A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city and kill most of its people. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are prime examples of the fatality caused by an atomic bomb. Several nuclear explosions over modern cities would kill tens of millions of people.
Oppenheimer turned out to be a “missed opportunity,” Tina Cordova wrote in The New York Times. It ignored the people living downwind of the Trinity test who were exposed to radiation, and the miners who extracted the uranium that Hanford made into plutonium for the blast.
What Oppenheimer Really Meant When He Said "I Believe We Did" To Einstein. The final moment of Oppenheimer is a mini-montage of modern nuclear weapons being activated across the world and the whole of Earth being torched, which is exactly what Oppenheimer meant by "I Believe We Did," and exactly what he was afraid of.
What would happen if 100 nuclear bombs went off?
But assuming every warhead had a megatonne rating, the energy released by their simultaneous detonation wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would, however, make a crater around 10km across and 2km deep. The huge volume of debris injected into the atmosphere would have far more widespread effects.
The United States is reportedly missing six nuclear bombs to date. Although there were rumors that the bomb was retrieved by a Soviet submarine, no evidence has been found to support this, so it is still accepted that the Tybee bomb remains in its original dropped location.
Here, it's important to stress that even if the nuclear event doesn't happen in your immediate area—even if it's hundreds of miles away—the fallout could still potentially reach you in a day or less.
Would you survive a nuclear blast 30 miles away? At a distance of 20-25 miles downwind, a lethal radiation dose (600 rads) would be accumulated by a person who did not find shelter within 25 minutes after the time the fallout began.
As others have mentioned, no one was vaporized, as in their bodies get heated to a point where there matter goes into a gaseous state. The “small” nukes used in Japan simply do not provide enough heat to do this, unless you happen to be inside the fireball.
2023 Doomsday Clock Announcement
The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.
The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 10 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by manmade technologies.
The Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бомба, tr.
That means most Americans would be safe from the initial barrage. But from there, as counterforce evolves into counter-value, Russian missiles would begin targeting larger cities, including New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
A new video simulates the explosion of thermal nuclear weapons in the Challenger Deep. Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear bomb ever made. One bomb would be stanched, but a million could easily destroy the Earth.
What if a nuke hit the US?
Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones.
To increase the probability of an intercept, the United States has to shoot multiple interceptors at each incoming ballistic missile. At present, because its inventory of interceptors is limited, the United States can shoot down only a handful of ballistic missiles that have relatively unsophisticated countermeasures.
The US Department of Health and Human Services recommends staying indoors for at least 24 hours in the event of a nuclear explosion. After 48 hours, the exposure rate from a 10-kiloton explosion (the type that might damage but not destroy a city) goes down to just 1%.
In 1942, during World War II, U.S. Army Colonel Leslie Groves recruits Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, who is Jewish, is particularly driven by the Nazis' potentially completing their nuclear weapons program, headed by Heisenberg.
A hydrogen bomb has never been used in battle by any country, but experts say it has the power to wipe out entire cities and kill significantly more people than the already powerful atomic bomb, which the U.S. dropped in Japan during World War II, killing tens of thousands of people.
