How far do you need to be from a nuclear bomb to survive?
It’s something that has been on a lot of people’s minds – what would actually happen in a nuclear war?
And how far away from the bombs would you have to be to survive?
Science YouTubers ASAPScience have the lowdown in an uplifting, cheery video this week.
There are still nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world – about a tenth of which are armed and ready to fire within minutes.
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ASAPScience looks at the damage potentially caused by a one-megaton bomb – much smaller than many of those deployed by Russia and the U.S.
ASAPScience says, ‘Most of the energy released in a nuclear explosion is in the blast, which drives air away from the site of the explosion – and crush objects or knock them down. Within a six kilometre radius, there would be an estimate 180 tons of force on every two storey buildings, with winds up to 255mph.
‘The human body can endure this amount of pressure, however the winds would create fatal collisions with nearby objects.
People up to 13 miles away could be temporarily blinded by the blast – and people up to five miles away could suffer third-degree burns.
At the centre of the Hiroshima blast, temperatures are estimated to have reached 300,000 degrees Celsius – 300 times hotter than a crematorium oven.
