North Korea: Putin In 'Chernobyl' Warning

[Paul E Ester]

Source: Sky News

Vladimir Putin said a war in Korea could be more devastating than the Chernobyl disaster - as Pyongyang was warned against another nuclear test.

The Russian President said he was "worried about the escalation on the Korean peninsula, because we are neighbours".

And Mr Putin, who also praised a US decision to postpone a planned missile test as part of efforts to reduce tensions, said he feared a situation worse than that in Chernobyl after a nuclear accident that was later linked to thousands of deaths.

"If, God forbid, something happens, Chernobyl which we all know a lot about, may seem like a child's fairy tale," he said.

Read more: http://news.sky.com/story/1075136/north-korea-putin-in-chernobyl-warning

[Renew Deal]

1. Is Putin right about that?

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

[Botany]

2. Much more because of the radioactive fallout

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

[GreenStormCloud]

9. Doesn't happen with air bursts, only with ground bursts.

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.

[NickB79]

10. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quickly rebuilt

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.

[Posteritatis]

12. They were also airbursts

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.

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Not onesies-twosies of WWII generation weapons, no.

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.

[bemildred]

4. Yes, he is. nt

[BadtotheboneBob]

5. I think he was referring to a possible war scenario...

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

[PatrynXX]

6. wanna ask japan about that?

those who weren't killed by the original blasts

[Renew Deal]

7. Yes, I'd love to ask

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

[Posteritatis]

13. Hiroshima and Nagasaki recovered about as quickly as a lot of the other cities

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.

[saidsimplesimon]

8. Thank you BRICS

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.

[xtraxritical]

11. Chernobyl will never support life again...

[former9thward]

15. There is plenty of life there.

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

[Baclava]

16. Wolves and other wildlife thrive in Chernobyl "exclusion zone"

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/

[John2]

14. I think all this talk,

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.