of whether a surface or air burst, the fireball will spread upward from
100 to 300 miles per hour at the beginning,
peak altitude,
and slowing as it approaches
If the explosion occurred on the ground,
the fireball will
suck up with it great quantities of soil and incinerated materials, carrying
the lighter ones to its highest altitude.
Local fallout of this material will
be heavy and only the lightest particles will ascend to thousands of feet,
If,
however,
an air burst,
the heat and shock waves will be maximized,
little material drawn up into the cloud with the fireball;
there will be little local Fallout.
out during the gaseous fireballs'
an air shot
but
consequently,
Great amounts of radioactivity are sent
formation and as it rises.
However,
if it is
,little radioactivity will be dispersed locally since little
material has been uplifted, and since the majority of the some 200 radioactive
products are so short-lived that many of them have gone through one or two
Essentially,
half-lives before the cloud has peaked,
in an air burst the
main radioactive elements are from the material itself, water vapor in the
air, and the metal bomb parts themselves, which have become mixed with the
fireball.
A nominal 20 kilotron
20 or 30,000 feet,
(20,000 tons of TNT) burst will rise to about
A one megaton bomb
(1 million tons of TNT)
10 minutes to a height of roughly 100,000 feet,
will rise within
If it was a ground burst, it
will have pulled up with it tremendous amounts of matter and made it radioactive.
The cap of the cloud will have poked itself into the stratosphere where high
winds will begin dispersing it worldwide.
The rest of the cloud column
will be torn about by lower winds which will carry the radioactive debris with
it.
The heavier particles fall out first, and lighter ones fall back down
later upon the earth helow, in a design created by the wind,
LOl4btd
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