vestal (03/30/83)
Remember all those shorts of buildings/trees/etc. being blown away by nuclear weapons? Back in the good old days (before REAL fireworks were banished underground, but after the insane notion that they could be used as more than fireworks cropped up) there were several tests conducted to find out exactly what effects these things had. I'm sure you've seen all the clips of soldiers charging mushrooms, fake towns being demolished, etc. All this information was gathered into a formal report, however, and was declassified. There's a whole series of books published by the AEC with a title of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" or something like that. The first one appeared sometime in the fifties, and a new update came out every few years until the test-ban treaty. This report had everything from the physics of the first second of a nuclear blast (did you know that the initial flash is actually twin-peaked for low-atmospheric blasts?), EMP effects, meteorological effects, medical effects, etc. A very dry, factual approach. Since there have been no additional above-ground tests since the last edition, I would assume that these results still form much of the basis for the views of The Powers That Be on what nuclear war would entail.