Dayton Business Daily

What is the relationship between the detonation of nuclear weapons and adverse health effects far from blast?

For example, could a single nuclear detonation increase cancer rates on the other side of the globe from where the detonation occurred, or would it take more than one to have a measurable effect in cancer rates? Are there other adverse health effects that are carried long distances by the atmosphere? How many nuclear weapons could go off before we should start to worry? Would now be a good time to figure out how to avoid using them -- ever?

Public Comments

1. Stand downwind of a nuclear blast and you are likely to grow another ear in the middle of your forehead.
2. The blast itself cannot create health problems far away, but the "fall-out" of radioactive material can affect a huge geographical area because it is spread pretty high up in the atmosphere. I don't think it would directly affect the other side of the world though, but indirectly through food transported around the world and such I suppose there could be contamination.
3. The World Health Organization concludes that 1.1 billion people would be killed outright in such a nuclear war, mainly in the US, Russia, Europe, China and Japan. An additional 1 billion people would suffer serious injurles and radiation sickness. This would represent by far the greatest disaster in the history of the human species and, with no other adverse effects, would probably be enough to reduce at least the Northern Hemisphere to a state of prolonged agony and barbarism. The nuclear winter that Carl Sagan spoke about would eventually spread to the Southern Hemisphere, killing all plant and animal life, and eventually mankind. In a 2-megaton explosion over a fairly large city, buildings would be vaporized, people reduced to atoms and shadows, outlying structures blown down like matchsticks and raging fires ignited. And if the bomb were exploded on the ground, an enormous crater, like those that can be seen through a telescope on the surface of the Moon, would be all that remained where midtown once had been. There are now more than 50,000 nuclear weapons, more than 13,000 megatons of yield, deployed in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union -- enough to obliterate a million Hiroshimas. But there are fewer than 3000 cities on the Earth with populations of 100,000 or more. You cannot find anything like a million Hiroshimas to obliterate. Prime military and industrial targets that are far from cities are comparatively rare. Thus, there are vastly more nuclear weapons than are needed for any
4. So I guess we can start a tiny nuclear winter if global warming gets too bad?
5. You figure it out , from the time big cancer outbreaks started(it now effects everybody)in the last sixty years,and just how long the rad's hang around for(I mean how soon they are absorbed into the enviorment including people)In my view one is too much,but to save a lot of hastle we should nuke their a__ and take their gas.
6. We have only used two in the last sixty years, what are you so worried about?
7. This depends on two factors. The smaller is the construction of the bomb. I'm not sure why, but some people use the non-nuclear uranium 238 to construct the bomb casing. This survives the blast and the bomb is known as a dirty bomb. The second, and larger, is what is on the ground when the bomb goes off, namely nuclear power plants. A bomb + power plant is considered a worst case scenario. To illustrate the problem, consider the Chernobyl melt down. When the powerplant exploded, the radioactive debris was carried about half a mile / 1 kilometre into the air. 100 to 150 million curies of radiation escaped into the air, set off radiation alarms in Sweden and Poland, and caused thyroid cancers 500km away. A 1000 Megawatt nuclear plant has radiation capacity measured in the billions of curies. When a nuclear bomb explodes near the ground, earth or water is sucked up into the mushroom cloud, becomes radioactive, and falls out (fallout) of the sky over the next 24 hours. The mushroom cloud at Nagasaki went up to 60000 ft / 18 km. So, if a 1 km high cloud caused thyroid cancer 500 km away, and assuming (probably incorrectly) a straight line linear equivalence, then a Nagasaki 20 kiloton bomb - 18 km high mushroom + nuclear power plant = 500 x 18 = thyroid cancer 9000km away. Put another way, if a nuclear bomb was exploded near the Three Mile Island plant near New York, and a west wind was blowing, the health effects occur as far away as Honolulu.