This means where I live (San Diego) I am in the fallout range of 5 different bases.

I'd better stock up on shotgun shells for the inevitable radiation zombies.

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Fourth, yes - this means burns extending into bone. It also applies to some incendiaries, such as white phosphorus.

Fifth, I've never heard of.

-Kle.

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Once you detonate below the troposphere, though, the radiation intensity of the bomb diminishes extremely fast as the detonation's radius expands. Anyone killed by Gamma Rays, then, would have been killed by the fireball anyway. The radiation sickness and death that results from fallout is entirely to do with the debris that the blast shoots into the air or leaves in-tact on the ground. In fact, once you get over a certain bomb size (100KT maybe? Not sure), so much of the debris from the initial blast is incinerated that radiation effects are almost negligible in comparison to the blast's physical damage.

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Anyway, in order to understand accurate thermal effects OR radiation effects, you'd have to calculate terrain, weather patterns,etc. AND you'd need to know if the bomb is being detonated on the ground, under the ground, or in the air (Big Man and Little Boy were both timed to detonate at a specific altitude, well before ever touching the ground) All of those things changes the destruction pattern greatly.

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