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That depends on a person's proximity to the hypocenter of the blast. The further away you are, even from a very large bomb, generally the better off you are, but there are many, many mitigating factors.

If you were at Hiroshima, Japan on the morning of August 6, 1945, and you happened to be standing on the bridge that was the aiming point for the first atomic bomb ever dropped in combat, you would have been literally vaporized. There would have been nothing left of you but the shadow you cast when the bomb went off (there were such shadows cast and recorded on the surrounding concrete that was not destroyed).

But the further away people were, depending on where they were and what sort of building they were in, or behind, their chances of surviving the initial blast rose pretty much proportionally by the distance from the hypocenter. Yet there were always exceptions; buildings that collapsed on people; people that were exposed to the direct radiation of the blast; and other factors too numerous to detail.

The other thing about a nuclear explosion, though, is the radiation exposure, and that also tended to be proportional to distance and what sort of shelter (if any) you had. Some people were relatively quite close to the hypocenter yet lived, even without radiation burns, while people miles away were terribly burned. It all depended on where they were and what type of exposure they received. But the really insidious thing about a nuclear explosion or even a nuclear accident is the exposure to residual radiation. People who went into the blast area to try to rescue other people were exposed to very high doses of radiation. Many of them died in the next few days and weeks. There are people dying of radiation induced cancer to this day in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some may never know whether the initial cancer was radiation induced or from some other cause, since causes of cancer are not yet completely understood.

Below are a couple of websites, one on nuclear weapons, and the other on the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine in 1986. If you read the one on Chernobyl carefully, you will learn a lot about radiation sickness. Hundreds were sickened, many died almost immediately, and the aftereffects will be felt for many years. Chernobyl itself is uninhabitable because the radiation levels are still so high.
See atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Examples of effects include:
-Death
-Cancer
-Disintegration
-Charring of the body
-Vaporization

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7y ago

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