Tag: nuclear war

Radiation dosages

Radiaton dosages from different sources. Graph by http://xkcd.com/radiation/.

xkcd has published an excellent graph showing where different dosages of radiation come from and how they affect health. It’s a complex figure, but it’s worth taking the time to look through. I find it easiest to interpret going backward from the bottom right corner that show the dosages that are clearly fatal.

One Seivert (1 Sv).

One red square of 100 red blocks is equal to one seivert, which is the radiation dosage that will kill you if you receive it all at once. Note:

  • If you were next to the reactor core during the Chernobyl nuclear accident, you would have gotten blasted by 50 Sv.
  • 8 Sv will kill you, even with treatment.
  • Getting 0.1 Sv over a year is clearly linked to cancer.
  • One hour on the grounds of the Chernobyl nuclear plant (in 2010) would give you 0.006 Sv.
  • Your normal, yearly dose is about 0.004 Sv, just about how much was measured over a day at two sites near Fukushima.
  • Eating a banana will give you 0.000001 Sv.

While I did not find equivalent exposure levels, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki lead to many deaths and sickness from radiation created by the explosions. Within four months, there were 140,000 fatalities in Hiroshima, and 70,000 in Nagasaki (Nave, 2010). The Manhattan Engineer District, 1946 report describes the radiation effects over the first month:

Radiation effects for the month following the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. (Table from The Manhattan Engineer District (1946) via atomicarchive.com).

The effects were not limited to the explosion itself, though. There is one estimate, that 260,000 people were indirectly affected:

Radiation dose in a zone 2 kilometers from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb was the largest. Also, those who entered the city of Hiroshima or Nagasaki soon after the atomic bomb detonation and people in the black rain areas were exposed to radiation. … some people were exposed to radiation from black rain containing nuclear fission products (“ashes of death”), and others to radiation induced by neutrons absorbed by the soil upon entering these cities soon after the atomic bomb detonation.

— Hiroshima International Council for Health Care for the Radiation Exposed (HICARE): Global Radiation Exposures.

HICARE also has a good summary of what happened at Chernobyl, where 31 people died at the time of the accident, about 400,000 were evacuated, and anywhere between 1.6 and 9 million people were exposed to radiation. Modern pictures of the desolation of Chernobyl are here. The Wikipedia article has before and after pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear Fallout: Chernobyl pictures

Just in time for us to start reading The Chrysalids, David Schindler has a frightening gallery from the abandoned surroundings of Chernobyl, twenty-five years after the accident with the nuclear reactor.

The YouTube video below shows the same images as the gallery.

Nuclear explosions

The history of the second half of the 20th century is interlaced with the history nuclear weapons. From ending the Second World War in the Pacific to mutually assured destruction to the conflict between India and Pakistan. It’s fascinating how you can interpret that history from video above showing the relative timing of the nuclear explosions. It also interesting to note just how many nukes were exploded and by whom. Wired magazine has a good article about the video, and I’ve posted previously about tying nuclear weapons into both the Natural and Social sciences.

Nuclear Winter and MAD


Almost every time I discuss protons, neutrons and the nucleus of an atom, or at least so my students complain, I end up talking about nuclear fission and fusion and nuclear weapons. If the discussion goes on long enough I tend to bring up the cold war and how the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) reduced the chance of a hot war. I don’t often get into how the explosions from a nuclear exchange could put so much dust into the upper atmosphere that it blocks the sunlight and create a nuclear winter that would affect life all around the world. A nuclear winter that would have an effect similar to the winter created by the asteroid impact that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The danger of nuclear weapons have not, unfortunately, gone away. There is a facinating article in Scientific American on how even a “small” nuclear war could have global consequences. They have a great quote from Mikhail S. Gorbachev about how,

“Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act.”

The major finding of the research in the article is that even a small nuclear war, such as between India and Pakistan, could lead to a significant global nuclear winter.

I like to take every chance I get to tie natural and social world concepts together. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about teaching in an interdisciplinary Montessori classroom. There is a beautiful and scary story here about how the science of the infinitesimally small has had a fundamental effect on the major geopolitical conflict of the latter half of the 20th century, and continues to affect us today.