Could The Fallout Series Actually Happen?

So if you rad my last post, I assume you've gathered the idea that I really like the idea of the fallout series, but a big question to ask is is an atomic apocalypse real and possible? I mean there are fungi that can create zombies out of ants and meteorites are another scarily obvious possibility but could the world end because of good old human hostility?

According to Wikipedia, these are the countries that currently have nuclear weapons.

Less than you thought? Me too, I personally assumed that during the cold war a lot more countries would have gotten busy with their nuclear research but there are in fact only 5 recognized Nuclear Weapon States in the world today that are America, Russia, France, China and of course the UK.

The other colors stand for countries that do also have access to nuclear weapons, except for the countries colored green which are in fact states that used to have nuclear weapons but no longer possess them or have disassembled them in the case of South Africa.

All that aside there are estimated to be 10144 nuclear weapons in the world, which seems far too precise for an estimation but I'll let that pass as they probably know what they're doing.

So firstly lets look at the size of the are they'd need to nuke. The total surface area of the Earth is listed as  510 million square kilometers, but we only need to know the habitable regions. The total land surface area is listed as 149 million square kilometers. But the bombs would obviously be dropped on the populated area and so that is what we must calculate. Of this 149 million, deserts make up about 32 million, forests 39 million, mountains 30 million and freshwater 9 million square kilometers. Obviously none of these are able to have large communities and so the remaining surface area for humans to live on is only 39 million square kilometers, and even this will not be completely filled as humans don't live everywhere and they tend to clump together in regions rather than spread out and fill a whole area (95% of the population is estimated to live in 10% of the land area). But this figure fits our purpose so we'll use it for now.

The next factor which we must account for is the size of the bomb. In a nuclear explosion the damage can be thought of as circles around the area of the explosion. The first circle is the fireball radius, this tends to be very small and is the radius of the nuclear fireball itself. The second is that of the deadly radiation, with mortality rates of 50% and upwards, this radius is around 7.5km. The third and fourth radii are those of air blasts, this would gradually tail off, however they can remain deadly at radii of above 33km. The final circle is that of potentially the largest killer, the thermal energy. If large enough this will cause serious burns and create firestorms and can reach a terrifying 77km.

Comfortingly these are the figures that would be observed for the Tsar bomb, the biggest USSR bomb ever designed which packed a massive 100 megaton explosion (equivalent of exploding 100 million tonnes of TNT), However if all nuclear weapons were this powerful, it would only take around 2100 to nuke our 39 million square kilometers, meaning they they would have actually quite a good chance to be thorough and go over it 4 times, making sure they killed everyone.

Less comfortingly however, is that in a nuclear explosion, the explosion itself isn't the only killer. Possibly one of the most frightening implications of a nuclear bomb is the nuclear fallout which comes after.

When a nuclear bomb is detonated it releases massive amounts of energy in gamma waves, enough to actually cause a lot of the surrounding material e.g. dust to become radioactive aswell. And when the explosion forms its iconic mushroom cloud, all of this radioactive material is sucked up into it, and through this, into the atmosphere.


This radioactive material can be devastating to the environment, in some cases it has been seen to contaminate areas up too 500km away from the detonation! And when we take into account our ten thousand nuclear weapons, its pretty obvious that that's more than enough fallout to go around.

As a result of this, people would suffer mutations and illnesses, cancer would be widespread and the fact that isotopes such as Strontium-90 would be created which can directly bond into our bodies means that this radiation would most likely prove fatal for most.

However the good news is that if there ever does happen to be a nuclear war, provided you can survive the initial destruction, the fallout and any diseases that follow, you're pretty much in the clear!

So the final answer is yes, fallout could potentially happen, because physics.

Once again thank you all for reading, it means a lot to me that people actually read this! And if there ever is a nuclear apocalypse, fallout is more likely than we realise, with humanity's tendency to survive against the odds.

Anyway I'm finishing up now, so \i'll see you all again soon and thanks for reading! :)