Nukes

Nukes are cool. Nukes are interesting. Nukes are also weapons of mass destruction. I like nukes a lot, so I’m going to explain how they work and what they do.

The way a nuke works is by using conventional chemical explosives like Nitroglycerin to compact a sphere of Uranium 238 or Plutonium 239, so it is much smaller than it originally was. This causes their unstable nuclei to split, releasing lots of energy in the form of gamma radiation. These gamma waves in turn hit more nuclei causing them to split as well, releasing more energy, and so forth. This starts up a chain reaction that, in layman’s terms, makes bomb go big boom. You might be asking: why don’t nuclear reactors just explode? See, in a nuclear reactor, the fission is controlled and the energy is released in a relatively slow manner in order to boil water. In a nuke, all of the energy comes out in a trillionth of a second.

Now, lets go over what a nuke with an unspecified amount of Plutonium 239 is capable of. In the first picosecond of the nuke detonating, the shell around the core vaporizes and a burning sphere about a mile in diameter instantly appears. Inside of it, everything disappears. Why? Very simple. The sphere is 5 times hotter than the core of the sun, so everything inside vaporizes instantly. Seconds after the initial blast comes the thermal pulse, a wave of heat in which everything that can burn, will burn. One second your looking at your phone, the next, your entire body is on fire. At this point, the mushroom cloud forms, pushing high into the sky. Now comes the deadliest part of a nuke: the shockwave. The initial blast’s fireball pushes out a massive burst of air before it dissipates, leaving a vacuum where air should be. The air around the vacuum wants to fill the space, so it rushes in to do just that. In this moment, two things happen: a wave of air rushes out, strong enough to flatten buildings, then the air gets sucked back in to fill the vacuum left by the explosion. When the air goes out and then back in, the result is this: the city gets flattened, and fires from the thermal pulse get way bigger, resulting in mass destruction. The shockwave is the final stage of the nuke.

Shortly after the shockwave comes the fallout: radioactive debris pushed high into the atmosphere by the mushroom cloud begin to fall back down on the survivors in the ruins. The fallout can either be black rain or ash, and everyone in contact with it will be irradiated.

In the end, thousands, maybe millions, will have died. Most of those who survive will be permanently scarred and will probably succumb to cancer or radiation poisoning in the weeks, months, or years to come.