There is a bright flash of light. You instantly go blind. After a second, you begin to sweat;
your skin begins to burn. You feel as if you’re being cooked alive. Your cells begin to denature
as the heat intensifies, blood leaks out of your ears, you feel an intense pain
like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. After a few more moments, it is all over. Your
internal organs give up as a mushroom cloud rises up into the sky and blocks out the sun.
The distance you are from a nuclear explosion, and the type of nuclear explosion, determine
what will happen to your body when the bomb goes off. All nuclear explosions will have the
same kinds of effects on the body. However, it’s the size and power of the bomb that influences
the radius at which people will experience certain effects. For the sake of argument,
we will assume a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is detonated in your vicinity. This statistic
will be used to help identify the distance at which certain dangers take place. But
make no mistake, nothing good comes out of even the smallest nuclear explosions.
A nuclear explosion is created by splitting or fusing atoms together. In a 1-megaton bomb,
both nuclear fusion and fission are happening. When these processes are triggered,
the bomb releases an enormous amount of energy all at once. This creates a gigantic fireball,
a powerful shockwave, and a massive amount of radiation.
So, what would happen to your body if you were
approximately a mile away from a nuclear explosion?
When the bomb detonates, it releases all of its energy at once. The moment that the
explosion is initiated, the temperature and pressure around a mile from the blast site
will skyrocket. The temperature can get hotter than the core of
our sun and exceed over 15 million degrees Celsius. The intense heat causes a fireball
to erupt into the sky and incinerates anything within the surrounding area.
If you were standing somewhere within a mile of the nuclear explosion, every cell in your
body would instantly be torn apart to its basic elements. The temperature would be so intense
that the bonds between atoms would be broken, and the atoms that made up your body would be ejected
into the sky. The carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements that once made you, you, would mix
into the fireball. Death would come swiftly, and you would no longer exist in your current form.
You would survive slightly longer if you were standing
between a mile and three miles away from a nuclear explosion. However,
the explosion would still kill you at this radius, but in a different way.
Although you wouldn’t be incinerated or completely vaporized at this distance,
your body will receive a massive amount of thermal heat and radiation. It would
be so intense that seconds after the bomb detonated, your skin would begin to burn.
We are not talking about a slight burn like you’d get after spending the day at the beach;
we mean your body would burn as if you were in the middle of a bonfire. The cells throughout your
body would begin to denature; you would develop third-degree burns across your body. Soon after
the explosion, your skin would change color, and blisters would break out across your body.
During this time, you would feel excruciating pain until all of the nerve receptors throughout
your body were destroyed. Unfortunately, this could take several minutes if you were two to
three miles away from where the bomb went off. You would feel yourself being cooked alive until
you either went into shock or your vital organs shut down. Your skin cells would initially turn
red as they received massive doses of radiation but would eventually blacken. Blisters would pop
while blood and puss oozed out. You would lose liquids at an astonishing rate due to the burns,
which would also be one of the contributing factors to your death.
Within your body, your vital organs would begin to boil, and even though they are not exposed
directly to the rapid change in temperature around you, the cells that make up your heart,
lungs, and other vital systems would quickly die. Third-degree burns would even occur inside your
body due to intense radiation. This would only increase the amount of pain your body
would have to endure. Eventually, the extreme heat and high level of radiation would lead to
internal bleeding, and only minutes after the nuclear explosion, you would be dead.
If you did somehow survive, you would be praying for death. At some point,
your lungs would rupture, your heart would cease beating, and your brain would literally begin
to melt. However, since your body would go into shock after 24 to 30% of it was covered in third
and second-degree burns, you would pass out long before your internal organs were burnt to a crisp.
If you were far enough away not to die immediately from your burns, there would be a good chance
that the fires breaking out all around you would consume you in flames. If you were trapped in a
building that caught fire, the smoke from burning wood and other materials would cause you to
asphyxiate. As the smoke and radioactive particles filled your lungs, you would struggle to breathe
in oxygen. Your cells would not be able to carry out respiration to make energy. Without this vital
process, your cells instantly begin to die. You would be simultaneously poisoned and asphyxiated.
Regardless of if you were able to seek shelter and endure the initial nuclear explosion,
an unseen killer would still be lurking all around you. It’s
this terrifying aspect of a nuclear blast that would kill any survivors in the area.
Radiation is one of the deadliest threats to the human body after a nuclear explosion occurs.
Unfortunately, just because you survived the thermal heat from the nuke, it doesn’t
necessarily mean you are in the clear. If you were within 3 miles of the blast site,
you could receive a dose of radiation high enough to immediately cause symptoms
of radiation sickness. The DNA in your cells would be torn apart, and as your cells tried
to repair each strand, mistakes would be made, resulting in mutations. This would cause basic
cellular functions to cease. Proteins that are vital for almost all life processes would be
drastically changed by the radiation resulting in changes in shape. Without the appropriate
proteins carrying out their functions, your body would not be able to maintain homeostasis.
Cells would begin replicating uncontrollably, which would result in numerous cancers enveloping
your body. Cancer itself is the uncontrolled division of your own cells, and unfortunately,
the radiation given off by nuclear explosions almost always results in cancer if the dosage
is high enough. It’s the damage that the radiation causes to the DNA in your cells
that causes them to replicate nonstop. However, with the amount of radiation
entering your body, you would be long dead before the cancer could kill you.
If you were located somewhere between 3 and 6 miles away from the nuclear explosion, the effects
on your body become a bit more complicated. You may live longer, but due to certain
symptoms that would arise, you may find yourself wishing that the initial blast consumed you.
A very real threat to your body at this distance is death by flying debris. When
the bomb detonates, everything in the vicinity will be instantly superheated and vaporized,
causing a massive change in air pressure. This pressure change results in a shockwave that
could travel over 150 miles per hour. The closer you are to the blast, the stronger
the wind speeds will be. In some cases, the wind could be traveling more than 450 miles per hour,
which is enough to blow you off your feet and slam you into whatever is behind you.
In this situation, your bones would snap, and you’d die from blunt-force trauma. As
the wind forces your body to fly through the air, you will eventually connect with
a solid structure or hit the ground. If you hit your head, the force will shatter your skull,
sending shards of bone into your brain, causing instant death. A less merciful way to go would
be if your body is slammed to the ground and your own bones puncture your internal organs
causing you to bleed internally, which would eventually induce organ failure and death.
At distances further than 3 miles away, you likely won’t get swept off your feet,
but there is still the danger posed by flying debris. At these speeds, shards of metal,
glass, or wood could still hurtle through the air uncontrollably. If anything solid hit you
at 150 miles per hour, it would cause serious damage, especially if it’s sharp and you are
impaled by something like a flying signpost or sharp branch. Depending on what the nuclear
blast flung in your direction and where it hit your body, you could die from blood loss.
A less deadly but still destructive side-effect of a nuclear blast is called flash blindness. When a
nuclear bomb detonates, a large amount of energy is also given off as light waves. These are so
intense that anyone looking towards the explosion when it occurs will temporarily or permanently
go blind. This phenomenon can affect people that are up to ten miles away from the blast.
The intensity of the light given off by the explosion is increased at night when your retinas
are enlarged to naturally take in more light so you can see better. This means that if the bomb
goes off when it is dark, the effects of flash blindness can be heightened. The massive amount
of high-intensity light waves entering your retina oversaturates the retinal pigment, which in turn
means that the light entering your eyes can’t be resolved into an image and sent to your brain. The
further away you are, the less likely you are to go permanently blind, but it isn’t a guarantee.
Although flash blindness is not fatal, its side effects can be. For example, if you happen to be
driving a car when the nuclear bomb goes off and you temporarily become blind, you could smash into
an oncoming car, and that would be the end of your story. Similarly, if you are blind after
a nuclear explosion, your chances of getting to safety are greatly reduced. And when it comes
to treating burns, radiation sickness, and any injuries caused by the blast, urgency is key.
But your eyes are not the only part of your body that will be damaged
due to changes in the physical world. When the blast goes off,
you may not only experience blindness, but you could go deaf as well.
You will undoubtedly see the bright light from the detonation before you experience
anything else associated with the explosion. This includes sound. Nuclear explosions are
often depicted as noiseless catastrophes where there is a bright flash of light and a mushroom
cloud of destruction. However, in reality, nuclear explosions are excruciatingly loud.
If you are within five miles of the blast zone, it will take a few seconds for the
sound of the explosion to reach you, but it’s coming. The pressure change as a result of the
explosion will be around 5 pounds per square inch, which is enough to rupture
your ear drums. This wouldn’t necessarily be life-threatening, but it would make
conversing with other survivors and emergency responders more difficult. You might have a
constant ringing in your head, or everything could go completely silent. At the same time,
your balance would be thrown off, resulting in serious problems when trying to reach safety.
There is a different byproduct of a nuclear explosion that doesn’t appear
to have a huge impact on your body but could cause you some serious problems.
When a nuclear bomb detonates, it releases an electromagnetic pulse outward in all directions.
An EMP caused by a nuclear explosion is the result of the molecules in the air becoming superheated
and ionized. The ionized particles move outward and fry any electronic device they pass through.
Your brain and nervous system use electrical signals to communicate with the rest of your
body. There doesn’t seem to be any effect on local brain processes when someone is exposed to an EMP
blast, but it’s unclear if there are long-term implications that we just don’t know about yet.
What we do know is that animals, like certain migratory birds, rely on Earth’s magnetic field
to help them navigate and can be greatly impacted by an EMP. The EMP can throw off the mechanisms
they use to not only fly in the right direction but to keep from slamming into
one another. It may seem farfetched, but falling birds could pose a serious risk to
your health in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion and the subsequent EMP blast.
However, the EMP could be deadly to certain people. If you are someone with a pacemaker
that keeps your heart beating, you would be in a bad spot if you were within five to ten miles
of the explosion. This is the reach an EMP could have resulting from a large nuclear explosion. A
pacemaker has sensors and circuits that monitor heart rate and provide electrical stimulus to
the vital organ as needed. However, an EMP would completely fry such a device. In such a situation,
the heart would be left to beat on its own. For many people who have pacemakers,
their heart isn’t strong enough to properly pump blood and nutrients around the body.
If you have a pacemaker that becomes disrupted by the EMP released by a nuclear explosion,
you would feel a heaviness in your chest as your heart strains itself
to keep you alive. This tension would eventually result in a heart attack for
most people. If you are someone who relies on monitors to regulate brain function,
you would also be negatively affected by the EMP, as any neural stimulus would cease to function.
This also includes anyone who is hooked up to a life-sustaining device in hospitals
around where the nuclear explosion occurred. These people would begin to flatline moments
after the blast as all of these medical devices would be disrupted by the EMP.
The EMP released from a nuclear blast may not directly affect the body itself, but it would be
deadly for many people in the surrounding area. The number one hazard to your body created by
a nuclear explosion is radiation. Unfortunately, the fallout from a nuclear detonation can extend
for miles and miles, meaning even if you are far away, a nuclear explosion can still affect you.
There are two ways that your body can be exposed to radiation from a distance. The
first way is externally, which happens when the irradiated particles are forced outward
from the epicenter of the explosion and rip through your skin and body.
External exposure is especially dangerous when you are close to a nuclear blast.
However, it is the second type of exposure that can have long-lasting
consequences for your body and may lead to a life of misery.
Internal exposure occurs when you inhale particles that have been
irradiated from the nuclear explosion. As discussed before, when the bomb goes off,
it vaporizes anything in the vicinity while also pushing huge amounts of debris into
the atmosphere. All of the dirt and other particles ejected into the sky are wildly
radioactive. The mushroom cloud and smoke that results from a nuclear explosion also contain
radiation as well. It’s these particles that will eventually coalesce and drop back down to Earth.
Unfortunately, these small dust particles can be inhaled, and once in the lungs,
can cause serious complications to the rest of your body. The irradiated particles you
ingest can infect your cells, causing lung cancer later in life. However,
they can also get absorbed into your bloodstream and circulate around your
body, wreaking havoc on numerous body systems, including the liver and kidneys.
If you are over ten miles away from the blast site,
you probably don’t have to worry too much about being incinerated or being hit by flying debris,
but contamination by radiation is definitely something you should be
aware of. This is true even if you are wearing a mask or other PPE to protect
you from inhaling irradiated particles because radiation can find other ways into your body.
For example, the food you eat and the water you drink may also contain radiation
from a nuclear explosion. If you ingest contaminated food, the radiation enters
your digestive system. You could develop stomach, colon, or intestinal cancers,
all of which are life-threatening. If you ingest contaminated water, those particles will likely
make their way around your entire body and could infect cells in several different organs.
The biggest threat radiation causes is cancer. Even if you are far away from a nuclear blast,
the particles that enter your body can still cause this disease, and although
it may not be immediately life-threatening, the effects of radiation will make the coming years
miserable as your body literally destroyed itself. If the cancer can not be contained,
you could die as a result of ingesting only a small amount of contaminated food, water, or air.
Nuclear fallout can travel great distances depending on weather conditions. This means
a nuclear explosion could harm your body even if you are nowhere near where the bomb went off.
It is estimated that fallout can travel well over ten miles on strong wind currents. However,
on average, the further away from a blast site you are, the lower the concentration
of contaminated particles falling from the sky will be. Far-reaching fallout is the
result of vaporized particles from the initial blast being carried away by the
wind. As the air cools, these particles clump together and fall to the ground.
What it comes down to is that the closer you are to a nuclear explosion, the more likely you are
to die. Obviously, if you are close enough to be vaporized with everything else, you will not feel
any pain. However, if you survive the initial blast, your body is going to take a beating
due to extreme changes in temperature, pressure, and the amount of radiation entering your body.
Now watch “I Survived 100 Days of Nuclear War (Not Minecraft).” Or
check out “What Happens to Your Body on a High Protein Diet?”