Designing Facilities to Resist Nuclear Weapon Effects; Technical Manual TM 5-858-2 Weapon Effects
Washington DC: United States, Department of the Army, Headquarters, 1984. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Wraps. Various paginations (approximately 3/4 inch thick). Illustrations (Tables, Figures). Formulae. Glossary. Bibliography. Upper right corner has damp stains; all pages complete and separate. This manual together with TM 5-858-1, 31 October 1983 and TM 5-858-3 through TM 5-858-8 supersedes TM 5-856-1, 1 July 1959; TM 5 856-2, 15 March 1957; TM 5-856-3, 15 March 1957; TM 5-856-4, 15 March 1957; TM 5-856-5, 15 January 1958; TM 5-856-6, 15 January 1960; TM 5-856-7, 15 January 1958, TM 5-856-8, 15 January 1960; and TM 5-856-9, 15 January 1960. The purpose of this manual is to provide guidance to engineers engaged in designing facilities that are required to resist nuclear weapon effects. It has been written for systems, structural, mechanical, electrical, and test engineers possessing state-of-the-art expertise in their respective disciplines, but having little knowledge of nuclear weapon effects on facilities. While it is applicable as general design guidelines to all Corps of Engineers specialists who participate in designing permanent military facilities, it has been written and organized on the assumption a systems-engineering group will coordinate design of the facilities. The effects of a nuclear explosion on its immediate vicinity are typically much more destructive and multifaceted than those caused by conventional explosives. In most cases, the energy released from a nuclear weapon detonated within the lower atmosphere can be approximately divided into four basic categories:
the blast itself: 40–50% of total energy
thermal radiation: 30–50% of total energy
ionizing radiation: 5% of total energy (more in a neutron bomb)
residual radiation: 5–10% of total energy with the mass of the explosion.
Depending on the design of the weapon and the location in which it is detonated, the energy distributed to any one of these categories may be significantly higher or lower. The physical blast effect is created by the coupling of immense amounts of energy, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, with the surroundings. The environment of the explosion (e.g. submarine, ground burst, air burst, or exo-atmospheric) determines how much energy is distributed to the blast and how much to radiation. In general, surrounding a bomb with denser media, such as water, absorbs more energy and creates more powerful shockwaves while at the same time limiting the area of its effect. When a nuclear weapon is surrounded only by air, lethal blast and thermal effects proportionally scale much more rapidly than lethal radiation effects as explosive yield increases. This bubble is faster than the speed of sound. The physical damage mechanisms of a nuclear weapon (blast and thermal radiation) are identical to those of conventional explosives, but the energy produced by a nuclear explosion is usually millions of times more powerful per unit mass and temperatures may briefly reach the tens of millions of degrees.
Energy from a nuclear explosion is initially released in several forms of penetrating radiation. When there is surrounding material such as air, rock, or water, this radiation interacts with and rapidly heats the material to an equilibrium temperature (i.e. so that the matter is at the same temperature as the fuel powering the explosion). This causes vaporization of the surrounding material, resulting in its rapid expansion. Kinetic energy created by this expansion contributes to the formation of a shockwave which expands spherically from the center. Intense thermal radiation at the hypocenter forms a nuclear fireball which, if the explosion is low enough in altitude, is often associated with a mushroom cloud. In a high-altitude burst, where the density of the atmosphere is low, more energy is released as ionizing gamma radiation and X-rays than as an atmosphere-displacing shockwave.
In 1942, there was some initial speculation among the scientists developing the first nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project that a large enough nuclear explosion might ignite the Earth's atmosphere. This notion concerned the nuclear reaction of two atmospheric nitrogen atoms forming carbon and an oxygen atom, with an associated release of energy. The scientists hypothesized that this energy would heat up the remaining atmospheric nitrogen enough to keep the reaction going until all nitrogen atoms were consumed, thereby burning all of the Earth's atmosphere (which is composed of nearly 80% diatomic nitrogen) in one single massive combustion event. Hans Bethe was assigned the task of studying this hypothesis from the project's earliest days, and eventually concluded that combustion of the entire atmosphere was not possible: the cooling of the fireball due to an inverse Compton effect all but guaranteed that such a scenario would not become a reality. Richard Hamming, a mathematician, was asked to make a similar calculation just before the first nuclear test, with the same result. Nevertheless, the notion has persisted as a rumor for many years and was the source of apocalyptic gallows humor at the Trinity test. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: Military Manual, Technical Manual, Nuclear Weapon Effects, Burst, Electromagnetic Pulse, Fireball, Thermal Radiation, Airblast, Ground Shock, Crater-induced, Ejecta, Debris Impact, Firestorm, Residual Radiation, Military Construction, Facility Design
[Book #81564]
Price: $225.00