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Wednesday, 29 May, 2002, 15:59 GMT 16:59 UK
Impact of a nuclear strike
Everyone can agree that the death toll would be huge if a nuclear conflict broke out between India and Pakistan.
Some analysts have come up with hypothetical death tolls of three million or 12 million - with millions more injured - should there be a nuclear exchange. With just two examples of nuclear bomb explosions in cities - the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than 50 years ago - the basic mechanics of what happens are known, but it is hard to transpose the models of 1945 onto other cities. But the prospect of such a disaster even led Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to compose a poem reflecting on the cost of "the ultimate weapon". Click here to read the Indian prime minister's poem Firestorms and fallout First, the blast of the bomb creates intense heat and pressure.
Everything is immediately vaporised amid temperatures of up to 300 million degrees Celsius. People are also killed by burns and the massive changes in pressure which can burst a person's lungs. Heading outwards from the epicentre, people will suffer burns, injuries from flying debris and acute exposure to ionising radiation. Even if those injuries would not normally be life-threatening, many people would die as local infrastructure and medical services would have been destroyed and unable to cope with the sheer numbers of casualties. Firestorms would develop and a cloud of radioactive fallout is spread with the wind. Radioactive fallout particles enter the water supply and are inhaled and ingested, affecting communities perhaps thousands of miles from the blast. In Hiroshima in 1945, shockwaves had destroyed everything within a four-kilometre (2.5-mile) radius 10 seconds after the bomb exploded 567 metres above the ground. Three days later a bomb nearly twice as large was detonated 500 metres above Nagasaki and total destruction spread about 1km. The different effects of the two bombs blown up over Japan show how a myriad of factors determine the destructiveness of a nuclear weapon. 'Unthinkable'
"Even the use of one weapon if it's on a city would have a massive effect - it's unthinkable," he said. "There would be months in which people lead the most terrible life." The impact of a bomb would spread far outside India and Pakistan, Dr Baverstock warned - not simply in terms of the passage of the radioactive cloud but in people's response to the war. "There should be no effort spared to stop this," Dr Baverstock said. Mr Vajpayee's poem
Sometimes at night,
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23 May 02 | South Asia
27 May 02 | South Asia
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