Nuclear war impacts A NUCLEAR BOMB WILL FLATTEN A CITY. War, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Deterrence Some Conceptual and Moral Issues. Richard Wasserstrom. Ethics, Vol. 95, No. 3, Special Issue Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (Apr, 1985), pp. 424-444. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381030 A single, one megaton nuclear bomb or warhead is one which possesses eighty times the explosive power of one of the two nuclear weapons ever used to date, the one dropped on Hiroshima. Were such to be detonated a mile or so above a large urban area, it would, in virtue of its explosive force, flatten virtually every structure within a radius of four miles, and it would heavily damage buildings within a radius of eight miles. Within two miles from the center of the explosion, winds of four hundred miles per hour would be produced, and four miles from the center they would still have a speed of one hundred eighty miles per hour.
