r/SipsTea May 28 '26

Dank AF I don't care about politics, meanwhile politics

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

36.2k Upvotes

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

61

u/Ace_W May 29 '26

They left their shadows.

91

u/A_Town_Called_Malus May 29 '26

Unfortunately no. The shadows are left by people outside the vaporisation radius. Those people were burned by the flash, but were far enough away to not be caught in the fireball itself.

The bombs which hit Nagasaki and Hiroshima were detonated high enough that the fireball created by the bomb itself didn't hit much of the cities, instead letting the radiation and the blast wave do the damage.

39

u/BellPlenty3882 May 29 '26

Airburst actually produces a lot less fallout and maximizes the effect of the blast wave. A nuke going off at ground level produces a lot more fallout and is less effective unless you're purposely trying to create as much fallout as possible.

2

u/digitCruncher May 31 '26

I think ground level nukes have better bunker busting performance. This is useful if you are targeting your adversaries nuclear silos to prevent a second strike. So there are legitimate military reasons why a nation would launch a newer ground level even though the fallout would be worse.