WI Question: Nuking Certain Locations

This is an odd thread, I don't know whether it belongs here or in future history...

This is an idea I've had. What if a nuclear bomb is dropped on a specific spot? How far will the contamination reach?

First question: A bomb is dropped right smack dab in the middle of jolly ol' England. Not Britain or the UK, but England itself. Will it "pwn" the entire country and turn it into Fallout: New London? :p Or will England recover and that area will just be contaminated? I'm pretty sure I read no one in England lives more than 70 miles from the sea, so that doesn't sound good, since, if I remember correctly, radiation from a nuke spreads over 100 miles...
 

Thande

Donor
The effects of individual nuclear weapons have been vastly exaggerated by popular culture. If you dropped the biggest nuke ever made on the middle of England (i.e. Leicester), it would barely take out Leicester, never mind anything else (which is why post-1960s the superpowers stopped trying to build bigger nukes and focused on multiple-delivery warheads that would scatter several smaller ones across a wider area). Radiation contamination is a major issue but it's more of the order of "everyone downwind has a somewhat higher chance of developing cancer" rather than "everyone immediately starts glowing green and developing a Mad Max post-apocalyptic society".

This is not to say a nuclear war would not cause the breakdown of civilisation, but that's because there's at least one bomb landing on all your cities. A single nuclear attack is no bigger a disaster than, say, a reasonably nasty earthquake.
 
Radiation contamination is a major issue but it's more of the order of "everyone downwind has a somewhat higher chance of developing cancer" rather than "everyone immediately starts glowing green and developing a Mad Max post-apocalyptic society".

That gave me a good laugh. :D

The effects of individual nuclear weapons have been vastly exaggerated by popular culture. If you dropped the biggest nuke ever made on the middle of England (i.e. Leicester), it would barely take out Leicester, never mind anything else (which is why post-1960s the superpowers stopped trying to build bigger nukes and focused on multiple-delivery warheads that would scatter several smaller ones across a wider area).

This is not to say a nuclear war would not cause the breakdown of civilisation, but that's because there's at least one bomb landing on all your cities. A single nuclear attack is no bigger a disaster than, say, a reasonably nasty earthquake.

Thank you, that was very helpful!


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The biggest problem with radiological contamination is that it gets into the food chain. Even if the contamination is undetectable by instruments, it will be concentrated in higher and higher proportions the farther up the food chain you go. This actually happened in southern Utah with radiologically contaminated milk. It eventually became so bad that you could hold up a geiger counter to a child's thyroid and have it buzz like a rattler. Another good example is Bikini Atoll, which is still uninhabitable because of contamination of plants and animals. As for actual blast effects, they're not supernatural like they're portrayed in popular culture.
 
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