Nuclear blast question for magazine

[PublicRyan]

Hi all,

 

Apologies if this isn't the right forum for this question but I need some help.

 

I'm writing a feature on whether certain videogame scenarios are realistic or not and I specifically need help with a famous scene taken from Call Of Duty 4:

 

 

Here, you see a helicopter that gets caught in a nuclear blast with the pilot then crawling out of the wreckage and dying shortly afterwards. Due to my own ignorance of the subject and that events are naturally exaggerated for the sake of a videogame, I honestly have no idea how realistic this scenario is.

 

So my questions are as follows:

 

1) Would the radiation from a nuclear blast kill that quickly when that close or would the pilot have died from injuries in the crash?

 

2) Is there any way anyone within that range of a nuclear blast can even survive the initial force?

 

3) What would the immediate effects of radiation be on someone that close to the blast?

 

Apologies again if this isn't the right forum for asking such a question but I'm completely stuck!

 

Thanks once again!

[md65536]

I imagine a crash like that would be more survivable than the explosion itself.

 

Considering the amount of damage around the crash site, I doubt someone could survive the blast, given that the helicopter was open and it landed even farther from the blast after being hit. Nearby buildings are damaged completely *through* their entire structure. I think that much damage may be unrealistic (relative to the size of the mushroom cloud), but that much explosive force would probably destroy the helicopter and kill its occupants.

 

The wind at the end is silly. Once the mushroom cloud has expanded from the blast, it rises upward (not continuously outward) because of the heat. It would suck air inward.

[Iggy]

Humm....

 

I've seen better renderings.

 

I'd be willing to bet that if you don't go blind from looking in the direction of a nuclear blast you wouldn't die immediately from acute radiation poisoning.

 

Too close to a blast and you'd obviously be incinerated or die from some kind of kinetic trauma immediately. A little further away with the wrong exposure and wind conditions you'd die some 24 or 48 hours later of infection or whatever other secondary complication from the radiation. The space between these things... that is to say, the physical space in distance... is not much, by my understanding.

 

It's like dying in a fire. You either die immediately in the fire from smoke inhalation and the temperature and so on... or you die a couple days later in the hospital because too much of your skin has been exposed to burns and you can't recover. There aren't a lot of cases where someone dies 20 minutes after being rescued from a fire. I'm sure it can happen, but it isn't the norm. If it doesn't kill you straight away then it's probably going to take a day or two.