Brigade XO wrote:
Must have been a realy good vest pocket nuke if they were able to rebuild the temple within just a couple of years and not have much challange with the radiation from the divice.
One would think that having a nuclear bomb go off within a headquarters building should play havoc with the site for a while. All that messy radiation. How did they deal with the nice crater if it was an on ground or underground blast? How much really important equipment did they lose, I mean, just how small can you make a nuclear explosion?
You can make a nuclear explosion as small as one atom if you like - particle accelerators do this all the time. That is the limit.
Nuclear weapons can be tuned to yield a lot of different things, depending on what you are trying to do. Better designs tend to have less fallout, and there are designs that basically only generate neutrons to kill things, but leave infrastructure intact so you can take over facilities without having to clear a lot of debris.
As for the left over radiation, remember what causes high radioactivity is short half life. So most of the highly radioactive material would have been gone by the time the temple was actually built, about 60 years after the explosion (note that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still major cities, even though the weapons were not particularly clean - and actually generated a lot more radiation than had initially been believed as shown by subsequent studies). Today, it requires very specialized equipment to detect the radiation left over from the bombing, and the levels are far less than natural background radioactivity.
While there might be a few deaths attributable to radiation in those cities, the deaths due to smoking induced cancer swamp any possible measurement of weapon induced deaths. To put it another way, studies of the survivors of the bombings show that a person had to be exposed to the actual explosions to have a detectable increase in cancer deaths. Persons moving into the cities later who were not exposed to the actual explosions have no detectable increase in cancers.
In the context of the Safehold stories, since the area was basically only inhabited by the archangels, there would be no effects on the general population by the time the temple was actually built.
The safety standards for radiation were largely set on the experience of the results of attacks on the two cities; the fact that the weapons actually produced far more radiation than originally estimated in the 1940s means the safety standards are generally far more conservative than necessary to provide the level of protection designed in the standards. In other words, radiation exposure is not as dangerous as people generally think it is. Adding to this is the politicization of setting of these types of standards to the lowest detectable amounts, not the amounts that actually would be potentially dangerous.
