Hey steemians!! How is your day going? My post today is about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a danger that has been in existence for more than seventy years, their destructive ability has being the greatest anthropogenic threat the human race has ever seen, their destructive force are so powerful and absolute that they can wipe out whole cities in a matter of days, prominent examples are the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, personally I feel they might be the instrument that ends the human race as we know it.
As defined by Wikipedia . a nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission(fission bombs) or from a combination of fission and fusion reactions(thermonuclear bomb). In layman's terms a nuclear weapon is a weapon that releases high amounts of energy in the nucleus of certain types of atoms in form of an explosion. Explosions from a nuclear weapon can cripple a city and kills most of its occupants, and to make matters worse make the few survivors terribly sick. The first nuclear weapons were built by the United States of America during World War II, as at 2018 the United States and Russia have the highest amount of nuclear weapons, although many other countries also have; China, France, United Kingdom, India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan. The only African country to possess nuclear weapons are South Africa but they decided to destroy them.
TYPES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Fission weapons : for fission, a mass fissle material (enriched uranium or plutonium) is forced into supercritically either by shooting one piece of sub-critical material into another or by compressing using explosive lenses a sub-critical sphere of material using chemical explosives.
nuclear fission
Fusion weapons : Also known as thermonuclear weapons or hydrogen bombs, they use fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen(deuterium and tritium). Thermonuclear weapons are more difficult to execute successfully than primitive fission weapons.
nuclear fusion
There are also special purpose nuclear weapons for example a neutron bomb is a weapon that makes a small explosion but a large amount of neutron radiation; a device like this can theoretically be used to cause massive deaths while leaving buildings intact and creating minimal fallout.
WEAPONS DELIVERY SYSTEM
A system used to deliver a nuclear weapon it's a contributing factor used in both nuclear weapon design and nuclear strategy. The design, development, and maintenance are the most expensive part of a nuclear weapons program; they accounted for about 57% of the money spent by USA in nuclear weapons project since 1940.
The preferred nuclear weapon delivery system is a nuclear weapon mounted on a missile, which can use a ballistic trajectory to deliver the warhead from the sky. The development of long range inter-continental ballistic missiles(ICBM) and submarine launched ballistic missiles(SLBM) has given nations the ability to deliver missiles anywhere in the world.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTROL
Because of the fact they are weapons of mass destruction, the use of nuclear weapons are important issues in international relations and diplomacy, in many countries the use of nuclear weapons can only be authorized by a president, head of states, or dictator. Despite control measures governing nuclear weapons, there is the fear of accidents, mistakes, false alarms, sabotage.
NUCLEAR TESTS
Over 500 nuclear tests were conducted at many sites around the world from 1945 to 1980.
HUMAN HEALTH EFFECTS
Initial stage—the first 1–9 weeks, in which are the greatest number of deaths, with 90% due to thermal injury and/or blast effects and 10% due to superb lethal radiation exposure.
Intermediate stage—from 10–12 weeks. The deaths in this period are from ionizing radiation in the median lethal range – LD50
Late period—lasting from 13–20 weeks. This period has some improvement in survivors' condition. Delayed periods from 20+ weeks. Characterized by numerous complications, mostly related to healing of thermal and mechanical injuries, and if the individual was exposed to a few hundred to a thousand millisieverts of radiation, it is coupled with infertility, sub-fertility and blood disorders. Furthermore, ionizing radiation above a dose of around 50–100 millisievert exposure has been shown to statistically begin increasing one's chance of dying of cancer sometime in their lifetime over the normal unexposed rate of ~25%, in the long term, a heightened rate of cancer, proportional to the dose received, would begin to be observed after ~5+ years, with lesser problems such as eye cataracts and other more minor effects in other organs and tissue also being observed over the long term.
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