12/28/2023 0 Comments Atomic bomb explosionThe attacks killed between 60-80,000 people in Nagasaki and between 70-135,000 people in Hiroshima in the months that followed. This can be illustrated by the US bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of WWII and the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine. The detonation of a weapon near the surface of the Earth could both kill many people at once and taint the environment and food supply for years. The detonation of a weapon in the air can kill many people at once, with less of a long-term impact on radiation in the surrounding population and environment. Spaulding said that different weapons can be detonated for different strategic reasons. "Whereas an airburst doesn't necessarily have the same fallout worries." "In the latter case, that's when you have to worry about fallout, because you are basically radioactively activating Earth," said Spaulding. Weapons that detonate at high altitudes produce different effects than weapons that detonate on or in the ground, said Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Nuclear fallout is hard to predict because it is highly dependent on how and where a weapon is used. People pray silently for the victims in front of Atomic Bomb Dome at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima Image: Kunihiko Miura/The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP/picture alliance Nuclear fallout depends on the type of weapon In this second article, we will look into the short and long-term health effects that the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on surrounding populations in 1945.Įxperts use the study of those bombings at the end of World War II to understand what might happen if a nuclear weapon were detonated today. And we compared those accidents and to what might happen in the event of fallout from an accident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been central to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In the first article of this series, we looked at accidents at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, and at Ukraine's Chernobyl power plant in 1986, analyzing the impact those accidents had on the surrounding populations. When we think about the war in Ukraine and the nuclear threat that it poses, we often think of two scenarios: an accident at a Ukrainian nuclear plant or the fallout from nuclear weapons.
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