If you’re within a shout of ground zero, there’s no avoiding it-you’re dead. Kokkinakis came up with doesn’t apply to the immediate vicinity of a nuclear blast.

The advice that he and his colleague Ioannis W. “Very little is known about what is happening when you are inside a concrete building that has not collapsed,” says Dimitris Drikakis, an engineer at the University of Nicosia and co-author of the new paper. Moreover, 20th-century experts lacked the sophisticated computational capabilities that their modern counterparts can use. But most of their research focused on factors like the fireball or the radiation or simulating a nuclear winter, rather than an individual air blast. Their results were published on January 17 in the journal Physics of Fluids.ĭuring the feverish nuclear paranoia of the Cold War, plenty of scientists studied what nuclear war would do to a city or the world. To help you find the safest spot in your home, two engineers from Cyprus simulated which spaces made winds from a shockwave move more violently-and which spaces slowed them down. So, you’ve just seen the nuclear flash, and know that an air blast is soon to follow. That front tears through the air at supersonic speed, shattering windows, demolishing buildings, and causing untold damage to human bodies-even miles from the point of impact. When a nuke goes off, it usually creates a shockwave. All of these are real, and all of them can kill.īut just as real, and every bit as deadly, is the air blast that comes just instants after.

In the nightmare scenario of a nuclear bomb blast, you might picture a catastrophic fireball, a mushroom cloud rising into an alien sky overhead, and a pestilent rain of toxic fallout in the days to come.

Nuclear fallout shelter locations