suppose the protection was the best available - lack of secondary ignition sources.
Nuclear weapons emit large amounts of thermal radiation as visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. [...]
The light is so powerful that it can start fires that spread rapidly in the debris left by a blast. However, the high winds following the blast wave will put out almost all such fires, unless the yield is very high. This is because the intensity of the blast effects drops off with the third power of distance from the explosion, while the intensity of radiation effects drops off with the second power of distance. However, in urban areas, the extinguishing of fires ignited by thermal radiation matters little, as fires will be started anyway by electrical shorts, gas pilot lights, overturned stoves, and other ignition sources.
This is of course the question - has
enough damage been done already to Berlin
conventionally to remopve all the above fire risks?
I'm aware of rolling power cuts in early 1945, gas supply problems, shortages of kerosene - but NOT a
total absence of same, so a good percentage of those risks will be present.
Hiroshima’s Post Office, 0.12 mile from ground zero, was gutted by fire hours later well in the firestorm, but over 50% of its 400 occupants had already survived the explosion and escaped. Photos of the final burned out areas show firestorm effects which occurred after survivors had time to escape, not unsurvivable, instant Encore-type thermal radiation-induced newspaper-filled inflammable room flashover in a dry desert. The firestorm in Hiroshima took 2-3 hours to reach a maximum intensity. The secret (full) U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey May 1947 report on Hiroshima interviewed over 1,000 survivors, and their evidence was that the fires were started by the blast wave overturning the obsolete charcoal braziers in obsolete city-centre wooden housing slums, which were full of inflammable paper screens and bamboo furnishings.
This obsolete mechanism caused the firestorm, not thermal flash ignition, which cannot directly ignite sound wood.
I'm not sure a reference to the “
Biological Effects of Blast” is necessarily a good reference on what thermal flash can or cannot do. And "
The Effects of Nuclear Wepons" would argue differently...given that out to 3-3 and a half miles, the wood in buildings will NOT be....sound, but in the form of debris, shattered timbers - and
painted wood, flammable period furnishings, wallpaper etc....
European debris, as tested in the post-Trinity tests over the next few years and recorded in "
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons"
but only for the inefficient gun-type fission bomb, it would be too early for the implosion-type bomb.
Inefficient in terms of total conversion of fissionables into energy (or not!)...but we're NOT talking in terms of that here, but instead in terms of final explosive yield. A kiloton is a kiloton
in terms of shockwave, overpressure etc....
Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Cash, no Hope and no Jobs....
Lord, please keep Kevin Bacon alive...