While a megaton-class yield surface burst will inevitably throw up many tons of ( newly ) radioactive debris, which falls back to the earth as fallout, critics contend that despite their relatively minuscule explosive yield, nuclear bunker busters create more local fallout per kiloton yield.
12.
One of the documents that the committee plans to release Wednesday includes a memorandum, dated May 22, 1951, about a meeting to discuss safety issues for three planned nuclear explosions that would be the first intentional " surface bursts, " causing craters and much fallout.
13.
The commercial opens with a very young girl standing in a meadow with chirping birds, slowly counting the petals of a nuclear explosion, an explosion similar in appearance to the near surface burst Trinity test of 1945, followed by another cut to footage of a billowing mushroom cloud.
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On the other hand, the only time that fallout is rapidly concentrated in a potentially lethal fashion in the local / regional area around the explosion is when the nuclear fireball makes contact with the ground surface, with an explosion that does so, being aptly termed a surface burst.
15.
In the 1985 " The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange ", it argues that a " plausible " estimate on the amount of stratospheric dust injected following a surface burst of 1 megaton is 0.3 teragrams, of which " 8 percent " would be in the submicron / micrometer range.
16.
:* The rangefinder electronics ( Figure 2 ) is a Doppler radar using FMCW technology to emit a radar signal and can be set to trigger two types of air-bursts, one being a near surface burst to combat standing targets and the other being a higher proximity burst downward onto prone or fox holed targets.
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While this ( or any ) tactic would be useless for someone at ground zero during a surface burst nuclear explosion, it would be beneficial to the vast majority of people who are positioned away from the blast hypocenter : both the thermal pulse of some weapons and the shrapnel from all weapons ( particularly from shattered windows ) could be evaded, at least in part.
18.
A notable comparison to underline this is found when one compares the 50 megaton air-burst Tsar Bomba, which produced no concentrated local / early fallout, and thus no known deaths from radiation, with the surface burst of the 15 megaton Castle Bravo, which in comparison, due to the local fallout produced, was implicated in the death of 1 of 23 crew on the decayed to acceptable levels.
