North Korea: Putin In 'Chernobyl' Warning

I didn't think a nuclear bomb had as much radiation as a meltdown.

the blast sucks tons of dirt and stuff into the air which when it settles back to earth
poisons large areas of land.

If the nuclear fireball touches the earth, then there will be many tons of fallout. If the nuclear fireball stays in the air, then there will be very little fallout.

Your picture is of a ground burst.

Air busts are militarily more useful as the blast effect is magnified by blast being reflect from the earth and being combined with the direct blast wave, causing more destruction one the ground and at a greater distance of about 40%. Since the fireball doesn't touch the ground, troops can quickly move into the area. However, if the target is underground then a ground burst sends a shock wave through the ground, but greatly contaminates the place.

And millions of people have lived there in the past 60 years with little evidence of massive nuclear pollution.

Chernobyl, on the other hand, is still too hot to lift the quarantine in effect since it's meltdown almost 30 years ago.

Unless North Korea's air force has some Bears and gets incredibly lucky if people started shooting, they'd have no way of delivering a nuclear weapon that didn't involve the ground somehow.

Either way, a North Korean nuke would be somewhere in between Chernobyl and Hiroshima in the "oh god this sucks so hard" department, and any place on that continuum is plenty bad enough.

Multiple modern weapons are hazardous to your health though.

Some products of the bombs are shorter lived, so it's not as much of an on-going problem. Let's say in the INCREDIBLY UNLIKELY hypothetical of a major US city being hit. Every burn unit in the country would be filled to over-capacity, overnight. (I do not believe NK has this capacity) So the challenges are very different. Both very bad.

... where nuclear weapons could be used - by one or both sides - and the 'fall out' from them reaching Russian territory.

those who weren't killed by the original blasts

Which will recover first, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Fukushima?

What was done to them wasn't any more thorough than what happened to a lot of Axis cities in the last two years of the war - it just happened a lot more quickly.

It's really, really difficult to overstate just how absolutely flattened Japan was in 1945. The fact that they were more or less back on their feet in a decade is all kinds of astonishing.

I abhor your repression of human rights, justice, andthe press.

I am thankful that President Putin, and President Xi Jinping are the voices of reason regarding a family dictatorship fueling the Kim's insane direction in N. Korea. A nuclear incident would not be in Russia's or China's best interests in the region.

More animals there now than before the accident since there are no humans to hunt them. It has become a tourist site.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/01/14/chernobyl.nature.radiation.debate/index.html

in a land without people, a lush wilderness returns

awesome full episode on PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/radioactive-wolves/full-episode/7190/

about what will happen in the case of nuclear weapons is theory only. I only know of one historical event where nuclear weapons was drop on a civilian population and the results were horrible. I don't care if you explode a nuclear weapon on the ground or in the air, there is only evidence of them being used once. The chance shouldn't even be considered about North Korea getting a lucky hit period. I assume the U.S. military has clear and convincing evidence a missile shield can protect against a nuclear attack and not just some evidence concerning conventional scud missiles? Do they have some experiment where this was actually simulated in live fire, because I sincerely have doubts they do? It is a gamble shouldn't even be considered.