For a bomb that size, people up to 21 km (13 miles) away would experience flash blindness on a clear day, and people up to 85 km (52.8 miles) away would be temporarily blinded on a clear night. The Blast Wave. Divide the height at which the bomb was exploded by the cube root of the yield. A nuclear weapon (also called an atom bomb, nuke, atomic bomb, nuclear warhead, A-bomb, or nuclear bomb) is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or from a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb).Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter.

A fraction of a second after a nuclear explosion, the heat from the fireball causes a high-pressure wave to develop and move outward producing the blast effect. For instance, with a 43-kiloton explosion at 500 feet, the value will be 142.9 feet. Two types of blast forces occur simultaneously in the shock front of the nuclear detonation: (1) static overpressure effects measured in pounds per square inch (psi) over ambient pressure and (2) dynamic pressure effects (i.e., wind), measured in miles per hour (mph).

Overpressure can cause eardrum rupture at a threshold of 5 psi and severe lung injury at 20 to 30 psi. Effects of Nuclear Weapons. After 10 seconds, when the fireball of a 1-megaton nuclear weapon has attained its maximum size (5,700 feet across), the shock front is some 3 miles farther ahead. Blast effects are usually measured by the amount of overpressure, the pressure in excess of the normal atmospheric value, in pounds per square inch (psi). Overpressure (or blast overpressure) is the pressure caused by a shock wave over and above normal atmospheric pressure. The front of the blast wave, i.e., the shock front, travels rapidly away from the fireball, a moving wall of highly compressed air. This is the height at which a 1-kiloton bomb must be exploded, in order to have the same overpressure as the original bomb. The General Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even the largest nuke ever detonated – a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb known as Tsar Bomba, which the Russians detonated over the Arctic Sea in 1961 – wouldn't be enough. Scale the height of the burst for a 1-kiloton explosion. In fluid dynamics, a blast wave is the increased pressure and flow resulting from the deposition of a large amount of energy in a small, very localised volume. Describes effects, particularly blast effects, and the response of various types of structures to the weapons effects. The shock wave may be caused by sonic boom or by explosion , and the resulting overpressure receives particular attention when measuring …

Play media. What's more, the NOAA article says, once an explosive's initial high-pressure shock moves outward, the surrounding air pressure in the hurricane would return to the same low-pressure state it was in before. The AsapSCIENCE video considers a 1 megaton bomb, which is 80 times larger than the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, but much smaller than many modern nuclear weapons (more on that later).

The effects of a moderate rain storm during an Operation Castle nuclear explosion was found to dampen, or reduce, peak pressure levels by approximately 15% at all ranges. The flow field can be approximated as a lead shock wave, followed by a self-similar subsonic flow field.In simpler terms, a blast wave is an area of pressure expanding supersonically outward from an explosive core.