Very good. A clear thinker.
“The E-4B is a 747 that has been reinforced to protect against the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear blast and is shielded from a thermal blast.”
I am so glad that the public can read this and find it comforting that the president can survive a small kiloton bomb blast as these aircraft were designed and built in the seventies for technology known at that time. They could no more stand up to today’s weapons than a stack of cards.
In remembering that the weapons used in Japan were a 16 kiloton yield, a 20 megaton weapon of today detonated within or over a large city area would result in a fireball and thermal pulse so huge that people would get second degree burns at a radius of over 28 miles from ground zero, which corresponds to a circular area of over 56 miles in diameter. From only one such bomb, therefore, as much as 2,460 square miles of the earth would be vaporized, burned, or blasted away—and that’s the destruction resulting only from the fireball and thermal pulse alone. If a 20-megaton bomb were to explode over downtown Chicago, people living in the farthest suburbs away from the city center would get second and third degree burns, and in most cases anything flammable that wasn’t initially vaporized would catch fire and burn to the ground. Temperatures of a nuclear explosion within the immediate area of the blast reach those in the interior of the sun, about 100,000,000° Celsius.
There is no aircraft other than one in space out of reach of the blast, the heat, the force of the fireball, and the days of extreme gamma and beta radiation, that can withstand this type of today’s capacity for as little as a brief second. And if they are delivered, they won’t be one. They will be over a thousand incoming ICBM’s, to use a phrase, so total devastation will be the intent. Mainly because we will also launch the same devastation “back at ya.”
Oh, and these planes can not stay in the air for days, whether it makes any difference or not, without fuel. And there won’t be any to get. Happy landings.
rwood
Blast radius is large, but not that big. 4-8 mile diameter is more reasonable estimate. Depends on bomb eqiv weight.
Yeah, but it's a dry heat.