Little Boy's Detonate Fails, explodes on Ground

Blue Max

[ARG! Typo on the Title. Change it to 'Detonator']

Stolen from the interesting part of this thread:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=90423

Suppose that instead of detonating at a height of 2,000 feet, as was originally intended, the first US Nuclear Weapon deployed against Japan is (accidentally) a ground burst. According to the other helpful poster in the above thread (RCAF) , the bombing target would have been near a major river running through the city, and would have caused a radioactive steam burst. In addition, the ground burst would eject a large quantity of radioactive fallout, poisoning much of the area with activated soil. Due to the smaller blast Radius of the explosion, initial deaths are likely to be lower, but long term ones much higher due to radioactive fallout.

The general question: how would this change affect history? Almost certainly, Japan would surrender quickly after the Nagasaki Bombing. But now the entire area of Hiroshima is irradiated for decades. In addition, because the death toll of radiation in Japan would be far higher than OTL as a result, would history change meaningfully as a result?
 

Geordie

I imagine (as did both RCAF and yourself) that there would be a bigger, stronger anti-nuclear lobby.

A CND analogue could become very powerful in this timeline.

Would they be able to prevent proliferation?
Personally, I doubt it.
 

Ofaloaf

How far could that radioactive material spread out into the sea? Could it seriously screw up parts of the Pacific for a while?
 

RCAF Brat

Ofaloaf said:
How far could that radioactive material spread out into the sea? Could it seriously screw up parts of the Pacific for a while?
Click to expand...

Not very far and not for very long in the small area affected. The Ocean is a big place. Between 1946 and 1963 the United States conducted some 300 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests, some of which were big enough to carve mile-wide craters. The British and the French also conducted between them a couple dozen atospheric and underwater tests, the last such being carried out by the french in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The last nuclear test in the area was an underground blast in the French test zone in 1995. Today the only signs are craters and mild radioactive contamination of the islands where the tests were conducted, and there is no trace of contamination in the seas around those places at all. It apparantly is safe to eat the fish, though fishing is prohibited in these areas.

Radoactive contaminants persist on land as some of them have half-lives in the sub-100-year range (the most dangerous, the ones with the really long half-lives are usualy more toxic as heavy metals than as radioactive substances, and the ones with the really short half-lives (<1 day)are effectively gone within a very short time, often days or weeks) and have chemical properties similar to substances required by plants and animals (most radiocative metals are not water soluable and it is dificult to get them into biological systems that way, though for people(and animals), breathing in dust or gas will do the trick, leaving the material lodged in the lungs).

An example would be cesium-137, one of the alkali metals, which has a half life of 31 years and behaves in a similar fashion to sodium and potassium, which are in the same chemical group and are found quite extensivly in biological systems. Cesium-137 is unfortunatly also very water soluble as cesium hydroxide. (that reaction, 2Cs+2H2O->2CsOH+H2 is actually explosive and will even occur if the water is frozen to a temperature of -116C) All in all a bad thing as the decay reaction will dump ionizing radiation straight into the organism, damaging it from within.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life
 
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