Nuclear expert explains exactly what would happen to you if you saw an atomic bomb explode

A nuclear expert has explained exactly what would happen to you if you saw an atomic bomb explode.

Alex Wellerstein, who is a nuclear historian, has lifted the lid on what it would be like to experience an atomic explosion.

Speaking to WIRED for their YouTube channel, the expert shared what would actually happen in the event of a bomb going off.

He explained: “The first thing, if you saw a nuclear weapon go off, the brightness of it, it’s very bright.

“With that brightness comes this flash of radiation. So if you are close enough to an atomic bomb, you will instantly get a lot of radioactive particles, gamma rays, beta particles, things like this going through your body.

“For the Hiroshima bomb, the radius from the detonation point where you get a fatal amount of radiation is about three quarters of a mile.

If you’re in that zone, you’re probably dead no matter what happens next. If you’re a little out of that zone, you might get some radiation. That is probably not your biggest concern for most nuclear weapons, but it’s not the best, right?

“The next thing that you would experience is heat. The surface of the fireball is hotter than the sun. Briefly. If you’re in direct line of sight with this, it’s sort of like if the sun was suddenly a lot closer to you than it is right now.

“If you’re really close to the fireball, you could be literally vaporized as people say. Most of the people at Hiroshima Nagasaki are not vaporized or melted or anything, but they were severely burned.

“You can get really bad burns. The next effect, that fireball in that first split second of it going off, is sort of super-heating the air around it. And what’s gonna happen then is it’s going to be moving outward.

A nuclear historian has lifted the lid on how the 'shock wave' would impact you (H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images)

“This is the shock wave, the blast wave. And as it goes out, it’s this sort of wave of pressure that’s going to intersect with the ground and move along it and push, and the more it goes, the weaker it goes.”

Many people took to the YouTube comment section to react to the clip, with one user writing: “I've been trying to understand this for literally decades, but this is the first time someone clearly and succinctly explained the deployment of a nuclear weapon to me. Thank you so much!!”

And another added: “Zero nuclear weapons seems like the ‘safest’ option for the most amount of people.”