While the US may talk of “small” nuclear bombs, these “small” bombs still have the destructive power of a Hiroshima bomb – the weapon that instantly killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people on August 6th, 1945. A similar number of people are estimated to have died in the weeks and months after the attack. A study by IPPNW shows what a nuclear war would entail: A regional war with only 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs would result in a global famine and up to two billion subsequent deaths. The only alternative to this scenario is a world without nuclear weapons.
The physical effects of a detonated nuclear weapon include blast, heat, an electromagnetic pulse, the release of ionizing radiation, and the production of radioactive isotopes in fallout.
A colossal blast wave causes trauma to lungs and other internal organs, but more indirectly, by objects which have been turned into missiles, by people being turned into missiles until they collide with other objects, or collapse of structures.
Heat the number of acute deaths caused by fire would be 3–4 times that caused by blast.
Radiation—including fallout from nuclear explosions—causes acute and long-term illnesses that are often deadly, as well as genetic and intergenerational health effects. For children under five years living within 5km of a nuclear plant, the risk of leukaemia is more than doubled, and excess risk extends to more than 50 km away. Data from several other countries are consistent with these findings.
A 5-Mt nuclear explosion….Within a distance of 4.7 km in every direction, all living things would die almost immediately-vaporised, crushed, charred, irradiated. 7.5 km in every direction, essentially everyone would be killed or seriously injured. Stretching to about 22.6 km in every direction, everything flammable would ignite, and thousands upon thousands of fires would coalesce into a giant firestorm. Wherever they were, most living things would die from burns and asphyxiation. Still further out, hundreds of thousands of people would be seriously injured. And everywhere the invisible, silent, lingering danger of radiation would persist.
In 2002, the National Cancer Institute warned that everyone on Earth had been exposed to fallout levels that had caused tens of thousands of cancer deaths.
Nuclear Weapon Facts IPPNW
Unspeakable Suffering Reaching Critical Will