Scientists reveal exactly how you will react after being hit by nuclear strike

dailystar.co.uk:

increasing threat of a nuclear strike, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin ratchets up the rhetoric over UK support of the resistance in Ukraine.Faced with the stark reality of nuclear war, it’s hard to know how any of us would react, but one team of scientists has a pretty good idea.

Researchers from the Biocomplexity Institute at Virginia Tech in the US have created detailed models of populations around the world, feeding in data from mobile phones, satellites and social media to build “synthetic populations” that behave just like the real thing.The models aren’t based on any specific person, but on groups of “average people” that behave in the same way real populations do.“They’re not you, they’re not me, they’re people in aggregate,” explains researcher Chris Barrett. “But it’s just like the block you live in; same family structures, same activity structures, everything.”If a nuclear missile hit a major city centre, a vast area would simply be vaporised, but outside the main blast area would be the possibility of the survivors taking shelter or fleeing to a safer area.In the early days of the Cold War, the question was simply academic.

One nuclear strike was expected to be immediately followed by a complete launch of both superpowers’ entire nuclear arsenal, wiping out our entire civilisation.But in recent years governments have been looking into the possibility of a “survivable” nuclear conflict – involving the detonation of a single warhead by a terrorist group or a rogue state like North Korea – or more recently Russia.“The chances [of Russia using a nuclear weapon] are low but rising,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear expert at the University of Hamburg and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the New York.