Additional Considerations When Responding to a Nuclear Attack

Abstract

Conventional explosions—even huge explosions such as the 2020 blast in Beirut (Rigby et al. in Shock Waves 30:671–675, 2020 [7])—pale in comparison to the magnitude of a nuclear explosion. In fact, the relatively primitive and low-yield bomb used to attack Hiroshima was larger than the ten largest man-made non-nuclear explosions combined. Or to look at the matter another way, while a large number of people have a huge amount of personal experience responding to attacks using chemical explosives, there are few—if any—people alive with comparable experience in responding to nuclear attacks. Because of this it seems reasonable to devote some attention to factors that make a nuclear attack so much more devastating than attacks using chemical explosives.