Would the atomic bomb had been used against Germany (and what would the consequences have been) ?

No as others have stated. In order to consume oxygen you have to burn something. The fireball from a nuclear explosion really doesn't have much in it to burn (perhaps some nitros oxide is produced but a lot of oxygen would remain). Now if there is a firestorm afterwards that's a different matter and might be possible in Berlin.

If he's going to have problems with radiation it's going to be falllout not gama radiation (i.e. not mirwaved). For that to happen he either has to exit quickly or eat the wrong food and/or stay in the wrong areas afterward. Certainly possible. Of course if there's a lot of rubble blocking the exit then he's not going to get out quickly. On the otherhand if he's out of communication for a couple of days there might be some "interesting" developments with regards to leadership in the Third Reich.

Well remember how a surface/ground burst is defined. I.e. the fireball has to touch the ground air interface. If the burst is half the fireball radius above ground it's a surface burst. Likewise if it's a fireball radius underground. However I suspect those bombs would not have survived impacting the ground. Put in a safty margin to prevent this and you probably aren't going to have a very big hole. On the other hand ground birst are much "dirtier". They produce more and longer lasting fallout than airburst do.

 

Wasn't he underground at that point?

 

This is alternate reality, where dropping a a-bomb causes people to grow 50'... You can't give a single freakin' zombie?

 

Look.....The explosion will consume oxygen, in the same way as when you mig weld oxygen is consumed by the arc and replaced by an inert gas. The force of the explosion will also disrupt the air causing it to move outward/ away from the hypocenter creating a vacuum and then the reverse once air mass near the hypocenter is replaced.
Long story short there would be a violent disruption in the area below the detonation of the bomb (Hypocenter) resulting in a disruption of breathable oxygen. Not to mention the fact that if Der Fuher, or anyone, standing next to an air vent would have been sucked out of the bunker; that is why NBC compliant bomb selters are equipped with air scrubbers, which can be closed off.

As far as I have been able to tell, while the bunker did have an air conditioning system it did not have an air scrubbing system, even though it may have had provisions for protection from a chemical attack, nothing leads me to believe they would have anticipated, or been prepared for, the detonation of an Atomic weapon in the vicinity of the bunker.

p.s. The flash would also super heat any remaining air making it unbreathable

 

Where is the oxygen going? A mig welder uses the inert gas to create a shield around the weld area to prevent oxygen from combinng with the hot metals, at least that's my impression. What is their in the fire ball to combine with the Oxgen? As I stated perhaps some nitrogen but I don't see that really consuming that much.

Indeed the pressure wave is a well known effect. Not sure that the air density would get too low to breath however. None of the descriptions I've seen of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or any of the tests indicated that. If it happened you were close enough that other damage mechanisms rendered it irrelevant.

I'd like to see some proof of that.

Actually no. The first event would be an over pressure event so the tendency would be to push one away from the vent. How hard would depend on just how the plumbing and air filtration worked. The suction even would be of lesser magnitude and somewhat later. Certainly some of the air would be super heated but it's not clear that any of that would be near the intakes of the ventilation system and the plumbing would likely cool it pretty quickly in any case.

But said hot air tends to rise pretty quickly. Indeed you can see it in the pictures. There is a thermal wave associated with the detonation but I'm not sure how it would effect such an underground bunker. Again we are talking either an air burst or a surface burst that will be centered well off the ground.

 

Stick your head out of a car window traveling 60 MPH, with your head pointing in the direction of travel, try to breath. Now imagine air traveling at about 50 gillion times faster.

The heat from a mig welding arc displaces the oxygen in the weld area and replacing it with an inert gas creating a shield. The shield is to prevent air from contaminating the weld.

Unless the bunker was designed to withstand an atom bomb detonation in close proximatey everyone in it would have died in the initial blast or shortly thereafter.

 

Which explains why Akiko survived this vacuum and air suckage only 300m from the hypocentre on the ground floor of the bank building, and Eizo survived in a basement a mere 170m from the hypocentre; there was no air and they were all sucked up into the fireball...


The range of thermal effects increases markedly with weapon yield. Thermal radiation decays only as the inverse square of the distance from the detonation. Thus, weapons in the megaton class and above are primarily incendiary weapons, able to start fires and do other thermal damage at distances well beyond the radius at which they can topple buildings or overturn armored vehicles. The effect of thermal radiation on unprotected human beings is likely to be very serious, producing flash burns over large areas of the body. However, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings demonstrated that once the victim is beyond the radius at which light-colored fabrics are directly ignited, even simple precautions can greatly reduce the extent and seriousness of thermal injuries. Many examples exist of people severely burned on their faces and arms, but unburned beneath even a thin shirt or blouse.

Because of the tremendous amounts of energy liberated per unit mass in a nuclear detonation, temperatures of several tens of million degrees centigrade develop in the immediate area of the detonation. This is in marked contrast to the few thousand degrees of a conventional explosion. At these very high temperatures the nonfissioned parts of the nuclear weapon are vaporized. The atoms do not release the energy as kinetic energy but release it in the form of large amounts of electromagnetic radiation. In an atmospheric detonation, this electromagnetic radiation, consisting chiefly of soft x-ray, is absorbed within a few meters of the point of detonation by the surrounding atmosphere, heating it to extremely high temperatures and forming a brilliantly hot sphere of air and gaseous weapon residues, the so-called fireball. Immediately upon formation, the fireball begins to grow rapidly and rise like a hot air balloon. Within a millisecond after detonation, the diameter of the fireball from a 1 megaton (Mt) air burst is 150 m. This increases to a maximum of 2200 m within 10 seconds, at which time the fireball is also rising at the rate of 100 m/sec. The initial rapid expansion of the fireball severely compresses the surrounding atmosphere, producing a powerful blast wave.

For an atomic-sized weapon the ball of fire rapidly expands from the size of the bomb to a radius of several hundred feet at one second after the explosion. After this the most striking feature is the rise of the ball of fire at the rate of about 30 yards per second. Meanwhile it also continues to expand by mixing with the cooler air surrounding it. At the end of the first minute the ball has expanded to a radius of several hundred yards and risen to a height of about one mile. The shock wave has by now reached a radius of 15 miles and its pressure dropped to less than 1/10 of a pound per square inch. The ball now loses its brilliance and appears as a great cloud of smoke: the pulverized material of the bomb. This cloud continues to rise vertically and finally mushrooms out at an altitude of about 25,000 feet depending upon meteorological conditions. The cloud reaches a maximum height of between 50,000 and 70,000 feet in a time of over 30 minutes.

As it expands toward its maximum diameter, the fireball cools, and after about a minute its temperature has decreased to such an extent that it no longer emits significant amounts of thermal radiation. The combination of the upward movement and the cooling of the fireball gives rise to the formation of the characteristic mushroom-shaped cloud. As the fireball cools, the vaporized materials in it condense to form a cloud of solid particles. Following an air burst, condensed droplets of water give it a typical white cloudlike appearance. In the case of a surface burst, this cloud will also contain large quantities of dirt and other debris which are vaporized when the fireball touches the earth's surface or are sucked up by the strong updrafts afterwards, giving the cloud a dirty brown appearance. The dirt and debris become contaminated with the radioisotopes generated by the explosion or activated by neutron radiation and fall to earth as fallout.

The relative effects of blast, heat, and nuclear radiation will largely be determined by the altitude at which the weapon is detonated. Nuclear explosions are generally classified as air bursts, surface bursts, subsurface bursts, or high altitude bursts.

Air Bursts. An air burst is an explosion in which a weapon is detonated in air at an altitude below 30 km but at sufficient height that the fireball does not contact the surface of the earth. After such a burst, blast may cause considerable damage and injury. The altitude of an air burst can be varied to obtain maximum blast effects, maximum thermal effects, desired radiation effects, or a balanced combination of these effects. Burns to exposed skin may be produced over many square kilometers and eye injuries over a still larger area. Initial nuclear radiation will be a significant hazard with smaller weapons, but the fallout hazard can be ignored as there is essentially no local fallout from an air burst.




Long duration of the positive pressure pulse and consequent small effect of the negative pressure, or suction, phase. In any explosion, the positive pressure exerted by the blast lasts for a definite period of time (usually a small fraction of a second) and is then followed by a somewhat longer period of negative pressure, or suction. The negative pressure is always much weaker than the positive, but in ordinary explosions the short duration of the positive pulse results in many structures not having time to fail in that phase, while they are able to fail under the more extended, though weaker, negative pressure. But the duration of the positive pulse is approximately proportional to the 1/3 power of the size of the explosive charge. Thus, if the relation held true throughout the range in question, a 10-ton T.N.T. explosion would have a positive pulse only about 1/14th as long as that of a 20,000-ton explosion. Consequently, the atomic explosions had positive pulses so much longer then those of ordinary explosives that nearly all failures probably occurred during this phase, and very little damage could be attributed to the suction which followed.


The ground shock in most cities was very light. Water pipes still carried water and where leaks were visible they were mainly above ground. Virtually all of the damage to underground utilities was caused by the collapse of buildings rather than by any direct exertion of the blast pressure. This fact of course resulted from the bombs' having been exploded high in the air.

Injuries to persons resulting from the atomic explosions were of the following types:

1. Burns, from
   Flash radiation of heat
2. Fires started by the explosions.

[*]Mechanical injuries from collapse of buildings, flying debris, etc.
[*]Direct effects of the high blast pressure, i.e., straight compression.
[*]Radiation injuries, from the instantaneous emission of gamma rays and neutrons.
Two types of burns were observed. These are generally differentiated as flame or fire burn and so-called flash burn.


The flash burn presented several distinctive features. Marked redness of the affected skin areas appeared almost immediately, according to the Japanese, with progressive changes in the skin taking place over a period of a few hours. When seen after 50 days, the most distinctive feature of these burns was their sharp limitation to exposed skin areas facing the center of the explosion. For instance, a patient who had been walking in a direction at right angles to a line drawn between him and the explosion, and whose arms were swinging, might have burns only on the outside of the arm nearest the center and on the inside of the other arm.

Generally, any type of shielding protected the skin against flash burns, although burns through one, and very occasionally more, layers of clothing did occur in patients near the center. In such cases, it was not unusual to find burns through black but not through white clothing, on the same patient. Flash burns also tended to involve areas where the clothes were tightly drawn over the skin, such as at the elbows and shoulders.

No estimate of the number of deaths or early symptoms due to blast pressure can be made. The pressures developed on the ground under the explosions were not sufficient to kill more than those people very near the center of damage (within a few hundred feet at most). Very few cases of ruptured ear drums were noted, and it is the general feeling of the medical authorities that the direct blast effects were not great.


tldr; An airburst has little fall out, because it doesn't suck significant stuff up from the ground. The ground close air was not "sucked up", was not "ignited" nor made unbreathable for any extended period of time. The fireball rises as it grows, rising faster than it grows: it never touches the ground. This is an airburst. Neither the blast nor the low pressure caused the earthquake proofed Bank to collapse. It didn't significantly affect subterranean utilities.

Just how close do you think they could drop the bomb in 1945, given they had no clear idea where it was?

 

That was one person....how many others were in or near those buildings? Seems to me that they were more the exceptions than the rules.

Historically the two bombs dropped on Japan were 300M and 3K, respectively, frm their intended targets. As for knowing where the bunker was that was not know; but, the Riech Chancellory building was in the Michilin Guide of the times and it's location was pretty well known.

You two need to lighten up

 

And what idiot does that for an extended period of time? Turn your head away from the wind, and breathing becomes easy again. The duration of the atomics' blast wave at any given radius from the explosion is not measured in minutes. What may occur, is you pass out temporarily as the consequential low pressure area temporarily reduces the partial pressure of oxygen in the air, just as occurs in an explosive decompression scenario on board high altitude aircraft. Which is why the instructions explicitly tell you to put your own mask on first, before helping others. Just on the aircraft, it's unlikely to re-establish significant pressure before you die, after having passed out. On the surface of the earth, the pressure will quickly return. You might get killed by flying debris if outside.

 

http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/

Akiko: TAKAKURA: Well, it was like a white magnesium flash. I lost consciousness right after or almost at the same time I saw the flash. When I regained consciousness, I found myself in the dark. I heard my friends, Ms. Asami, crying for her mother. Soon after, I found out that we actually had been attacked. Afraid of being caught by a fire, I told Ms. Asami to run out of the building. Ms. Asami, however, just told me to leave her and to try to escape by myself because she thought that she couldn't make it anywhere.

KAWAMOTO (0.8 km from Hypocentre): One of my classmates, I think his name is Fujimoto, he muttered something and pointed outside the window,saying, "A B-29 is coming." He pointed outside with his finger. So I began to get up from my chair and asked him, "Where is it?" Looking in the direction that he was pointing towards, I got up on my feet, but I was not yet in an upright position when it happened. All I can remember was a pale lightening flash for two or three seconds. Then, I collapsed. I don t know much time passed before I came to. It was awful, awful. The smoke was coming in from somewhere above the debris. Sandy dust was flying around. I was trapped under the debris and I was in terrible pain and that's probably why I came to. I couldn't move, not even an inch. Then, I heard about ten of my surviving classmates singing our school song. I remember that. I could hear sobs. Someone was calling his mother. But those who were still alive were singing the school song for as long as they could.

TERAMAE (0.5km from hypocentre): When the bomb fell, I was 15 years old. I was a third grader at the girls' junior high school. I saw something shining in the clear blue sky. I wondered what it was, so I stared at it. As the light grew bigger, the shining thing got bigger as well. And at the moment when I spoke to my friend,there was a flash, far brighter than one used for a camera. It exploded right in front of my eyes. There was a tremendous noise when all the buildings around me collapsed. I also heard people crying for help and for their mothers. I was caught under something which prevented me from moving freely. I was so shocked that I couldn't believe what had happened. I thought maybe I was having some kind of nightmare, but of course, I wasn't. I felt pain when I pinched myself to see if it was real. I thought the bomb had been dropped on the central telephone office. The dust was rising and something sandy and slimy entered my mouth. I couldn't figure out what it was since I couldn't move or see. I couldn't see anything in the dark. A little later, I smelt something like sulfur. It smelt like the volcano, Mt. Aso and I threw up. I heard more voices calling ``Mother! Mother!'' But when our class teacher, Mr.Wakita, told us to behave like good students and stop crying, all the cries for help and for Mother stopped all of a sudden. We began to calm down and try to behave as Mr. Wakita told us to. I tried very hard to move my arms and my legs and finally I was able to move a little. I was so surprised to see the dark sky with all the red flames through the window because it was only a few minutes before when the sky was blue and clear.

SAKAI: Around the time of the bombing I heard a voice shout, "A parachute is coming down." I was coming out of the passageway from the lavatory and looked for the parachute, but could not find it. Putting it out of mind, I turned back when there was an intense flash like the magnesium light used for photographing. By reflex, I crouched or rather, I felt down. And that was when I was jolted and knocked down by an immense force. The force and my fall all took place at the same time, all in one moment. When the blow came, I closed my eyes but I could still feel the extreme heat. To say the least, it was like being roasted alive many times over. It was terribly hot, much worse than the pain which one must endure when an incision is made during surgery. While trying to withstand the terrible heat, I moved my hand, but there was no feeling in it. I also tried to move my feet, but I couldn't tell whether they were still connected to my body. I was completely numb from my knees down to my feet and from my elbows to my shoulders. I looked out and it was pitch black. It was stifling. The heat was terrible. I took a deep breath and then mud and sand was sucked into my mouth. Thinking again, I held my breath for a few seconds. A little while later, I noticed that the side of my body was very hot. It was on fire. And I tried to put it out. But it wouldn't go out so easily. Here are the scars, these are my burns. I threw away my shirt and I sat down cross-legged, and glanced in front of me. I could see people running in the dark. Some of them were on fire, and some of them were just rolling around on the ground. Gradually it became lighter.

Several testimonies from people in a street car 780m from the hypocentre:
http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/hatchobori.html

 

Well, those are half a dozen stories of survivors.....seems like there were many more who were not as fortunate.

 

TABLE B:
Relation of Total Casualties to Distance from X Distance from X,
feet.......................Killed.......Injured.........Missing.......Total.............Casualties Killed per square mile
0 - 1,640...............7,505..........960.............1,127........9,592.............24,700
1,640 - 3,300........3,688........1,478............1,799........6,965...............4,040
3,300 - 4,900........8,678......17,137............3,597......29,412...............5,710
4,900 - 6,550...........221......11,958.................28......12,207..................125
6,550 - 9,850...........112........9,460.................17........9,589....................20


TABLE C: Percent Mortality at Various Distances Distance from X,
in feet.......................Percent Mortality
0 - 1000............................93.0%
1000 - 2000......................92.0
2000 - 3000......................86.0
3000 - 4000......................69.0
4000 - 5000......................49.0
5000 - 6000......................31.5
6000 - 7000......................12.5
7000 - 8000........................1.3
8000 - 9000.........................0.5
9000 - 10,000......................0.0

It seems almost certain from the various reports that the greatest total number of deaths were those occurring immediately after the bombing. The causes of many of the deaths can only be surmised, and of course many persons near the centre of explosion suffered fatal injuries from more than one of the bomb effects. The proper order of importance for possible causes of death is: burns, mechanical injury, and gamma radiation.

These figures show ordinary people going about their ordinary everyday business, not lurking in a deep bunker, substantially stronger than anything in Hiroshima or Nagasaki..

It would seem, if you were deep enough underground, in an over-engineered structure, to avoid those three effects, you could survive a relatively close airburst from an atomic-sized weapon. I do not volunteer.

 

Exactly. If the oxygen is in contact with the hot metal the metal will burn forming various oxides. There's almost no metal in the fireball of an airburst so almost nothing for the oxygen to combine with.

Given airburst of Hiroshima or Nagasaki sized weapons probably not.

If the effects were as you are stating none would have survived. Many certainly did die but as you can see below the mechanisms weren't the ones you were proposing.

From:
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml

??? We need to "lighen up" because we're correcting your mistaken assumptions? Other than making a pretty good case for you being wrong I don't see that we've done anything that would warrent that.

 

It's a "What If" and by it's very nature is based on assumptions. You guys seem to be picking nits and extrapolating minutia.

Granted the Fuher bunker was "over engineered", and therefore apparently imune to the effects of Atomic explosions occuring within it's proximatey, so was the Titanic allegedly immune to icebergs.

Now in all seriousness, there were thousands of people who were incinerated at the hypocenter of both bombs wether that incineration was caused by fire or other forms of thermal radiation is moot and is more symantical than factual.
So, maybe we could agree that the hypocenter of an atomic detonation is very hot and breezy.

 

But it is a dry heat, right?

 

I see nothing here that gives me confidence anyone knows the answer to this. Not sure about lightening up but a bit less showboating and a few more answers to the initial point raised would be of interest - unless of course all this talk is to hid the fact no one knows what the consequences would be. Brian

 

Just like Oddball, you see yourself as a deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep reserve position.