Can You Survive A Nuclear Attack? Here’s How.

Stay Inside So the flash of light is gone. It might be tempting to take a peek outside and see what’s happening. Don’t. Take a five-megaton warhead, for example. Its blast could reach around 15 miles, and the heat it produces is powerful enough to cause third-degree burns. If the building you’re in didn’t catch fire or start to cave in due to the blast of air, it’s better to stay inside. Remember that the concrete is absorbing the radiation that comes after, which, as you should, can damage your DNA and cause cancer, aplastic anemia cardiovascular diseases, chromosomal damage, and a host of other things.     Hiroshima after the bomb. ©Maarten Heerlien from Voorschoten, The Netherlands via Wikimedia Commons What if the building was falling apart? You had no choice but to get out of the building where you sought shelter. Cover yourself as much as you can, including your face. You might need to improvise with your shirt or whatever is available. Try to find another shelter to avoid the radioactive fallout, or the radioactive particles consist of debris, fission products, and dust. Its “shower” could take up to 15 minutes and can inflict significant damages to the body.  The most intense radiation will dissipate in a few hours so try to remain in inside a building, near the middle, or as deep in a basement as you can get. The longer you are outside and exposed to the most intense radiation the more likely you are to die from it. So while the impulse may be to run like Hell as far from the explosion as you can but doing so could very well expose you to more radiation than if you had stayed put. Time of exposure matters, remember? Take a Shower Once you’re rescued and in a safe area, take off all your clothes, place them in a plastic bag, and remove them from your house/shelter. Take a shower and thoroughly wash your whole body with shampoo and soap, including your eyebrows and eyelashes. Flush your eyes, too, and blow your nose to remove the fallout that you inhaled. Getting the radioactive particles off your body is removes you from close contact with radioactivity penetrating your skin, muscles, and bones. The radiation emitting from a given source is governed by the Inverse Square Law. Every time you double the distance from a source of radiation you reduce your exposure to one-quarter of the does at zero distance. So, a one-hundred Roentgen dose at one foot of distance is reduced to twenty-five Roentgens at two feet, and at four feet is reduced to one quarter again.  If you have shielding between you and the radiation source, the radiation is reduced even more. Distance matters, remember? A Weirdly Glowing Silver Lining While it is hard to imagine any good news about being caught in a nuclear explosion there may be some.  Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima are habitable today, Eighty percent of the residual radiation from the initial blasts had dissipated within forty-eight hours. Long term studies were done on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they found that a barely survivable whole-body dose of radiation only increases your risk of solid cancer by a factor of five over someone not exposed at all. That isn’t great news, but it also isn’t an automatic death sentence either.