Yet again I must give another hat tip to Alex Wellerstein the ridiculous 'Nuclear Historian'. I don't know about you guys but I seriously think we should make him an honorary Cluesforum member or something.
In
this article here Alex, as always, pushes the nonsensical imagery we've all come to know & love.
In particular the
RDS-37 imagery aka the Soviet Unions first 'true' H-bomb.
The composite imagery & lack of shadow changes from the 'Nuclear light' are typical of Nuke test movies of course.
More interestingly if you continue to watch the
best version of this test you see what happens when the huge blast wave hits the
City of Kurchatov.
The camera shakes, people fall in the street, animals run across the street, snow is shaken off the roofs of houses & there's a burst of chimney smoke (?) from another house... impressive I'm sure you'll agree.
As Alex mentions in his article this shockwave even managed to kill a small girl living in the city...
The inhabitants of the town were in a primitive bomb shelter. After the flash, they exited to see the cloud. Inside the shelter, however, was left a two-year-old girl, playing with blocks. The shock wave, arriving well after the flash, collapsed the shelter, killing the child.
There's just one tiny, weeny little problem with all this however.
The 'test site' for
RDS-37 is over 65KM away from the City!
An enormous distance which could not possibly be reached by a 'mere' 1.6MT... heck Alex's own '
Nuke Map tool' confirms it.
The largest ring shows the pressure required to break a window (roughly what we see in the movie) at 1.5psi.
How large must an explosion be to actually reach Kurchatov with a 1.5psi blast (which even then you wouldn't expect to be able to collapse bomb shelters & kill little girls)?
About 65MT... making the Russians
first H-bomb the
largest nuclear test in History... far larger than the 57MT
Tsar Bomba.
That ladies & Gentlemen is what we call 'a bit of a plot hole'.
I would suggest to the neutral reader that
real historical events don't come with plot holes?
EDITED
Minor spelling correction