Second - Lots of stuff has been vaporized by the thermal radiation, the shock wave is still rolling across the city tearing up everything in it's path.
Minute - Ground Zero is basically a vacuum but further out fires are starting amongst the rubble, the shock wave is close to reaching it's maximum radius and losing power rapidly.
Week - The fires are out (either put out or out of things to burn), rubble chokes the city, medical facilities are still totally overwhelmed with the injured and radiation sickness is showing up in more and more survivors. Safe water is particularly hard to come by.
The nuke itself was pretty much fully contained, damage from the towers falling was pretty localized to City Center. The blast itself probably disrupted some pipes, and the water table under the city might be kinda fucked up, but overall it's going to be business as usual withing a week.
They gave an exact description of the damage, and it was really really minimal. Really, with modern clean up techniques, the damage was only slightly more than what was seen on 911 in terms of property. The only property damage outside of the Arasaka Building was caused by the towers falling onto other buildings.
Somewhere on the site, I actually gave an illustration of the exact damage that occurred, which buildings were damaged from Arasaka towers collapse, but I am too lazy to dig it up right now, I may repost it if I can find the images on my HD.
As a sidenote, it really weakens Arasaka that they couldn't spin the blast by claiming that Terrorists under the employ of Militech and the US government were responsible for the detonation... since that's pretty much the truth.
They gave an exact description of the damage, and it was really really minimal. Really, with modern clean up techniques, the damage was only slightly more than what was seen on 911 in terms of property. The only property damage outside of the Arasaka Building was caused by the towers falling onto other buildings.
Somewhere on the site, I actually gave an illustration of the exact damage that occurred, which buildings were damaged from Arasaka towers collapse, but I am too lazy to dig it up right now, I may repost it if I can find the images on my HD.
As a sidenote, it really weakens Arasaka that they couldn't spin the blast by claiming that Terrorists under the employ of Militech and the US government were responsible for the detonation... since that's pretty much the truth.
As I remember correctly, and I do because I'm sitting with a Shockwave in front of me, the nuke that wrecked Arasaka Tower was buried in underground bunker with soulkiller mainframe and it just made the Towr collpse and didn't vapourised anything. Blackhand was stil able to fight Smasher while the building was collapsing and no one even got a scratch from EMP. Only in V3 (God, Mike why did you do that? Whyyyyyy?) The nuke somehow vapourised the whole corporate sector. So I really hope that no single thing from V3 makes into 2077.
I just don't know how a nuke could go off in an underground bunker and only damage one building (other then the fact of other building being damaged by it falling). I mean I can see the EMP being blocked as it is underground in a bunker designed to block it, but the bunker I cannot see containing the full blast, with an explosion of such a magnatude going out in all directions causing damage to surrounding buildings. A EMP lasts what a second at most, with the rest of the explosion which will travel outwards. I could see several blocks of demolished building in a nice circle from the explosion point with more damage from those building coming down. I can see weeks if not months (maybe even years) of reconstruction in that area, which doesn't even cover any potential radiation damage. I honestly don't see why they did not use a fuel air type explosive, even a small one would do the damage they needed to take out Arasaka Tower.
Nukes are scalable like every thing else, a small nuke is all it takes, it was there to wipe Arasaka's secrets out, and anyone who saw them... not to destroy the city.
And a fuel air bomb, as the name implies, requires a LOT of air to be effective, it's not somethihng you can really use in a basement...
And a fuel air bomb, as the name implies, requires a LOT of air to be effective, it's not somethihng you can really use in a basement...
The EMP is over before the first second, why I didn't mention it *grin*
As is the initial gamma burst.
It would depend on both the size of the nuke (as wisdom said) and how far underground the bunker was in the first place.
There are limits on how small you can make a nuke, you need a minimum amount of fissionable material to get an explosion. The smallest warhead ever made (to my knowledge) was around 23kg with a yield of around 0.1 to 0.2 KT (in other words 1-200 tons of TNT - FYI the Oklahoma City bombing was a yield of about 2.5 tons of TNT).
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yup-yup.
We were watching Watchmen the movie a few weeks ago and had to explain to the kids what the Cold War was. They'd never had to consider the idea of dying in a blast of light before, Dr Manhattan caused or otherwise.
Especially pertinent now with Russia doing its thing, eh?
"The Federation of American Scientists estimates there are more than 17,000 nuclear warheads in the world as of 2012, with around 4,300 of them considered "operational", ready for use."
About nuclear warfare, the movie "Threads" done by the BBC is great, it's a movie/documentary style, talking about a nuclear war, in a neutral way, there is no "they're good, we're evil", it's just :
"Ok, here we are, the nuclear war comes, how will it play out?", it goes untill almost 50years or something after the nuke, and it's so much real that it's creepy, seriously.
It's almost like fallout, but removing all the fun part, just pain & despair lol.
That said, in the movie there isn't only one nuke (it's based on the cold war US/URSS conflict), but it gives you a good idea about the damages and natural/health consequences of it.
It's a must see, very interesting.
I don't know if it's this one, or the previous in black&white wich were banned from TV because it was "too much realistic"
"Ok, here we are, the nuclear war comes, how will it play out?", it goes untill almost 50years or something after the nuke, and it's so much real that it's creepy, seriously.
It's almost like fallout, but removing all the fun part, just pain & despair lol.
That said, in the movie there isn't only one nuke (it's based on the cold war US/URSS conflict), but it gives you a good idea about the damages and natural/health consequences of it.
I don't know if it's this one, or the previous in black&white wich were banned from TV because it was "too much realistic"
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I stand corrected, 10-20 tons.
Oklahoma City was sill 2.5 tons ... one-eighth to one-quarter that.
For a GREAT, and realistic, movie try "The Day After" (1983).
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I saw that when it first aired... I was 7 or 8 at the time.... no horror movie ever effected me as bad as that movie..... I didn't sleep for weeks.
I found the thread:
http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/27325-The-canon-conclusion-to-the-4rth-Corporate-War
But I am just gonna repost the relevant bits here...
Here is Night City as presented in the full color map that came with the Sourcebook. The red highlighted portion is the area where the damage was limited.
At the end of the book Firestorm: Shockwave, it definitely describes the nuke as being underground, in the foundation of the building. The nuke itself doesn't seem to do any damage to the surrounding city, but the collapse of the towers causes the larger twin towers of Araska to fall. 1 to fall northeast, the other to fall West and slightly north, over onto other buildings, causing massive damage to WNS, The Stock exchange, Marshals department store, a night club(presumably Rainbow Nights), the 10th street center, the West Plaza Executive Tower, and some abandoned Militech Facilities are all completely destroyed, Other buildings take massive damage from debris as the two smaller Arasaka towers collapse to the eats and south west... including the US Federal Building, The Japanese Consulate, and the Microtech and WNS Towers. The Damage caused by both nuke, and complex collapse, is detailed fully on page 133 of Firestorm Shockwave.
This map is a close up of the damage zone that shows the buildings destroyed or damaged by the event.
The Nuke caused the 4 Arasaka Towers to topple in an x formation outward. The large NW tower was the first to fall, then its twin, then the two smaller towers...
This map shows the path of destruction caused by the Buildings, RED is for the two larger towers, who pretty much obliterated what they fell over on, except for the FED and Consulate, which only sustained massive damage, as opposed to outright destruction... Yellow is for the two smaller towers who managed massive damage, but did not destroy the buildings they impacted with.
During this fight, Johnny and Rache are confirmed dead. Thompson is grievously wounded, perhaps dead... Morgan and Adam Smasher are on the rooftop when the building collapses, and are presumed Dead. Saburo Arasaka has fled to Japan.
In the epilogue, Kei Arasaka, Saburo's heir, is forced to download his consciousness via Soulkiller into a digital prison by Rogue, Spider Murphy, and Shaitan.
Now... the important bits...
First, the nuke was detonated underground, it was a small low-yield device, primarily designed for excavation. As such, upon closer inspection, the damage from the nuke to the city is almost inconsequential. It was certainly NOT detonated at the top of the tower, if it was, all the iconic characters would be dead, as it is clearly stated to have been detonated while some were still on it, and others were hovering above.
Second, while the damage caused by the collapsing towers was heavy, it was not the major city destroying book described by V3, there is no way the body count reaches even a million.... It happened in the middle of the night, the body count would be less than that of 9-11.
OK given a micro yield (say 10 KT - because you just plain can't make a nuke any smaller - Physics 101 again) underground blast I can certainly buy the damage indicated.
The foundations of any building within 50m of the detonation point WOULD be damaged to the point the building would probably collapse. It seems that is the case given the four that did collapse.
However any building 50-100m (or so) away would also suffer significant foundation damage. Repairable given enough resources (probably - I'm not a civil engineer).
Given an underground blast radiation (fallout) effects would be insignificant on the surface (but don't try to build any new foundations or basements any time soon).
Actually the smallest device ever detonated was 0.01 KT which is roughly equivalent of Daisy Cutter bomb. So it is possible that the device had very small yeld. I recall info that arasaka's device was 2KT but cannot find it anywhere in FS. So I'm probably imagining things.
10 KT device, even underground would turn half the city into rubbles because of a massive earthquake. It would have greater damage radius than airburst, however apart from a kill zone in ground zero the extent of damage should be significantly lesser. But if the nuke was placed not too deep the effect would be similar to a ground burst. Smaller total damage radius, reduced flash but hell of an amount of radioactive fallout all over Northern California.
So in order to just topple the towers and vapourize underground sections without trashing the city a small 1KT device would be more than sufficient.
This is footage of 1.2 KT underground test. And it is quite devastating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62EIud5TvXo
If you're referring to :
How small can you make an atomic blast? http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=39669.0
or
Project Orion (nuclear propulsion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
You might want to note :
"Californium-251 has a very small critical mass (about 5 kg),[54] high lethality, and a relatively short period of toxic environmental irradiation. The low critical mass of californium led to some exaggerated claims about possible uses for the element. In an article entitled "Facts and Fallacies of World War III" in the July, 1961 edition of Popular Science magazine, the claim was made that "A californium atomic bomb need be no bigger than a pistol bullet. You could build a hand-held six-shooter to fire bullets that would explode on contact with the force of 10 tons of TNT."
Californium is vastly expensive to produce $10,000,000 Per gram so no one could afford these mini bombs even if they worked.
And the Orion 0.03 kt bomb was merely a math exercise. No bomb with a yield that small has ever been built.
However "Bored Chemist" did mention :
"The "smallest atomic blast" might be the annihilation of a single electron/positron,"
There are no nuclei involved in that so how "nuclear" is it?
Would the decay of a tritium nucleus (with the production of something like 20KeV) count as a nuclear blast?
But perhaps enough Nuclear Physics have been discussed, if we're not careful we'll have agents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) showing up at our front doors.
How small can you make an atomic blast? http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=39669.0
or
Project Orion (nuclear propulsion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
You might want to note :
"Californium-251 has a very small critical mass (about 5 kg),[54] high lethality, and a relatively short period of toxic environmental irradiation. The low critical mass of californium led to some exaggerated claims about possible uses for the element. In an article entitled "Facts and Fallacies of World War III" in the July, 1961 edition of Popular Science magazine, the claim was made that "A californium atomic bomb need be no bigger than a pistol bullet. You could build a hand-held six-shooter to fire bullets that would explode on contact with the force of 10 tons of TNT."
Californium is vastly expensive to produce $10,000,000 Per gram so no one could afford these mini bombs even if they worked.
And the Orion 0.03 kt bomb was merely a math exercise. No bomb with a yield that small has ever been built.
However "Bored Chemist" did mention :
"The "smallest atomic blast" might be the annihilation of a single electron/positron,"
There are no nuclei involved in that so how "nuclear" is it?
Would the decay of a tritium nucleus (with the production of something like 20KeV) count as a nuclear blast?
But perhaps enough Nuclear Physics have been discussed, if we're not careful we'll have agents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) showing up at our front doors.