Russian invasion in Ukraine has sparkled the possibility of horrific nuclear war in Europe.
No, we will not all perish in a nuclear war.
First and foremost, because there will be no nuclear war. Let us be clear from the start: nuclear strategic arsenals are characterised as deterrence because the world's atomic potential has been such for decades that the balance has been maintained.
There will be no nuclear war since there would be no one to benefit if a confrontation ended in the use of nuclear weapons. The economy would collapse, and no authority - state or non-state - would want a Mad Max post-apocalyptic situation to occur. This is the most reassuring comfort. Last but not least, China advised Moscow not to raise the stakes: the same spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, requested "all parties" involved in the Ukraine-Russia issue to refrain from raising the stakes.
So a nuclear apocalypse is ruled out by reason alone, but since you've come to read this article, you're probably worried and anxious about the images of atomic "mushrooms" that populate the pages of our local media, we can use reason to suppress anxiety and face the present with knowledge of the facts.
So, what was Putin's point in threatening nuclear war? In actuality, we are a long way from this. According to the video provided by Moscow, the Russian president has directed his generals to prepare strategic weapons (including ballistic missiles that are not technically loaded with nuclear warheads): this is the second level of readiness on a scale of four. Raising the nuclear alert level is one method of influencing risk perception. On the other side, during the Middle East conflict in 1973, the US boosted the alert level of nuclear forces to Defcon 3 in order to deter the USSR from intervening. As a result, Putin is now attempting to do the same. He attempts to frighten the West and deter it from offering.
An picture of hardship rather than power: in truth, things in Ukraine are not going as planned in the Kremlin, and the nuclear threat looks to be one of the only cards against what are Western sanctions that threaten placing Russia in severe trouble. Of fact, there is a forward movement of the hands of the atomic clock (the Doomsday Clock), in which midnight marks the nuclear catastrophe. However, this had already begun in 2020, with the weapons race and wars connected to climate change in full swing, so much so that the hands had been reduced to just 100 seconds at midnight in January. Assume, for the sake of argument, that one of the conflicting parties detonates a contemporary fission bomb of the most common sort (a few hundred kilotons).
A necessary premise to dispel any doubts: a nuclear explosion does not foreshadow a Chernobyl scenario in which entire regions are rendered uninhabitable by radiation: a nuclear device contains much less fissile material than a reactor, and everything is lost in the initial detonation, so fallout is a marginal effect and contained within an area of about 30 kilometres from "ground zero," the point of impact.
So, what occurs in these dreadful 30 kilometres, and what can be done about it? When an atomic bomb is detonated, the uranium (or plutonium) nucleus and all the fissile mass fission in a few thousandths of a second, and the material creates a temperature ten thousand times greater than that of the Sun's surface across a few hundred metres: everything is evaporated instantaneously.
The flash is so intense and full of x-rays and gamma rays that it doesn't even need to be seen from a distance. Immediately following, an air shock wave with the force of a tornado causes the collapse of structures within a three-kilometer radius. This is a few seconds that can be beneficial for finding cover within low-rise structures in order to avoid debris.
The heat wave caused by the core then incinerates anything made of cloth, plastic, paper, or wood that is within 6 kilometres of the epicentre. If decades of end-of-the-world movies have taught you anything, it's that now is the time to get into a bathtub with a wet blanket.
What about the radiation? Beyond 6 kilometres from the detonation site, the effects are no longer such that people's lives are in immediate danger. The most important thing is not to panic, which might lead to far more harmful actions: even at dosages of a few millisieverts per hour, the time margin before observable impacts on health is one day. Tap water may also be used if pulled promptly, and it may be necessary for as long as you are inside waiting for the panic to pass.
Now that you have a dosimeter, you can see whether you are in a region where the fallout causes radiation to exceed the 100 mSv limit, which is the threshold beyond which health problems occur. As everybody who remembers the terror caused by the Chernobyl cloud recalls, iodine pills become beneficial to avoid bad effects on the thyroid, but it is a precaution, particularly for youngsters. Avoiding panic is thus still the greatest advise.
The author Alberto Berlini is an Italian journalist.