It cannot bring about as much destruction as a nuclear bomb. Luckily, bomb shelters and bunkers can protect us, right?
The truth is that these structures have different capabilities to protect people from the powerful heat and explosion of nuclear bombs.
“It all depends on where the bunker is and the quality of the bomb,” says Norman, an associate professor of environmental health sciences and director of the Radiation Safety Officer Training Course at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Clyman spoke to Live Science.
According to Kleiman, bomb shelters were born during the Cold War as the US and the Soviet Union suggested mutually guaranteed destruction with nuclear weapons. Governments in both countries have designed programs to build shelters in large public buildings and encourage individuals to build bunkers inside or outside the home, Kleinman said.
Some people selling these shelters may have been looking to make money amid the crisis. “We’ve seen a lot of experience in the radiological safety program,” said Peter Karakappa, executive director of Columbia University’s Radiation Safety Program.
Related: Why do nuclear bombs form a mushroom cloud?
Bomb shelters do not necessarily guarantee safety in the event of a nuclear explosion. Its effectiveness comes down to both the bomb and the shelter quality.
Modern nuclear weapons are completely different from those of the mid-20th century. Nuclear weapons are much more powerful now, as they explode using a different response than they did in World War II or the Cold War era. Nuclear bombs of the 1950s had cores made of the radioactive element plutonium or isotopic uranium-235, where atoms split in a process called nuclear fission, causing major explosions. These bombs were a type of nuclear weapon known as atomic bombs or fission bombs.
“The size of these devices was much smaller than current nuclear weapons, and several orders of magnitude smaller,” Kleiman said. But now we use bombs that rely on hydrogen fusion to create that boom. These bombs utilize atomic explosions, which are described solely to cause larger thermonuclear explosions. This explosion can have a blast radius of up to 100 miles (160 km). (For comparison, the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a blast radius of about a mile, or 1.6 km.)
“If you’re 600 miles (1,000 km) away from the thermonuclear device, a shelter may help you,” Kleiman said. “But if you’re somewhere in that blast radius, the blast, the heat, the explosion, they’re trying to take you away.”
And there is the radiation problem. This is the release of waves and particles as a result of the blast. Kleiman said it is possible to build a bunker to protect you from radiation. The walls should be lined with 3-5 feet (0.9-1.5 meters) of concrete and steel, and lead. The lead is embedded in the shelter walls and entrances and exits, so the unharmed bunker is at little risk of exposure to residents.
Additionally, the entrance should “be something like a zigzag,” Kleiman said. Radiation travels in a straight line, so the zigzag entrance dodges it.
Capacarra has split the shelter’s protective capabilities into three components. It must be effective as a structure that withstands explosions and weather radiation (in partially depends on the location associated with the explosion), how much material is between you and you? The explosion can release and eliminate the material that has become unsuccessful or the material that has been produced and released from the nuclear explosion.
The fatal radiation lasts for several days after the explosion. Therefore, if you survive the initial explosion, you will need to stay in the bunker to avoid radioactive fallout. Therefore, your shelter, according to Kleiman, should be equipped with equipment, not only for the time that you need to ventilate without radiation for about a week, for about a week. This estimated timeline depends on how far the shelter is from the explosion. But “that doesn’t mean it’s safe, it means that radiation levels are low enough and you won’t die from acute radiation poisoning,” Kleiman continued. He added that cancer is one of the major long-term risks of radiation exposure, but that and other consequences may not emerge for decades.
So, a bunker just a few miles from the explosion would not be very useful, but a shelter tens of miles from the explosion can protect residents from radiation for several days. “It’s really a shielding issue,” Clyman said — “It protects from heat, protects from explosions, protects from radiation.”
