Pfeiffer indicated that the explosion lacked two hallmarks of a nuclear detonation: a "blinding white flash" and a thermal pulse, or surge of heat, which would otherwise start fires all over the area and severely burn people's skin.
The Beirut explosion created a huge mushroom cloud and visible blast wave, but nuclear weapons experts say it wasn't an atomic bomb. Here's why.
- A explosion at a port rocked the Lebanese capital city of Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least dozens of people.
- As videos of the explosion spread across social media sites, some users claimed an atomic bomb caused the disaster due to the appearance of a mushroom cloud.
- The Lebanese prime minister says the blast came from a stockpile of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse.
- Nuclear weapons experts say the detonation was definitely not triggered by an atomic bomb.
- Atomic explosions are characterized by a blinding flash of light, a pulse of searing heat, and radioactive fallout, none of which were detected.
When an
enormous explosion created a mushroom cloud over Beirut, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, online commentators and conspiracy theorists quickly jumped to a frightening claim: A nuclear bomb had gone off in Lebanon's capital city. But as state officials say, and contrary to those fast-spreading rumors, the explosion was almost certainly not caused by a nuclear weapon.
Even before Lebanese officials said the explosion was caused by a large stockpile of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the port,
according to The Guardian, experts who study nuclear weapons quickly and unequivocally rejected the idea that Beirut had been hit with a nuclear bomb.
Key to those rejections are the videos that Beirut residents managed to
record video of the huge detonation.
People trained cameras on the Beirut port at the time of the blast because a worrisome cloud of smoke rose beforehand. Some of those videos show small flashes of light and reports (or sounds) that are distinctive to fireworks. Moments later, the huge explosion — which came with a visible blast wave and mushroom-like cloud of smoke — rocked the area, destroying nearby buildings and shattering distant windows.
In a tweet that accumulated thousands of likes and reshares before it was deleted, one user wrote: "Good Lord. Lebanese media says it was a fireworks factory. Nope. That's a mushroom cloud. That's atomic."
Vipin Narang, who studies nuclear proliferation and strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, immediately spiked the claim. "I study nuclear weapons. It is not," Narang
tweeted on Tuesday.
Martin Pfeiffer, a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico who researchers the human history of nuclear weapons, also rejected
assertions on social media that a "nuke" caused the blast. "Obviously not a nuke," Pfeiffer
tweeted, saying later: "That's a fire setting off explosives or chemicals."
Pfeiffer indicated that the explosion lacked two hallmarks of a nuclear detonation: a "blinding white flash" and a thermal pulse, or surge of heat, which would otherwise start fires all over the area and severely burn people's skin.
The explosion did trigger a powerful blast wave that apparently shattered windows across Beirut, and it was briefly visible as an expanding, shell-like cloud — something often seen in historic footage of nuclear detonations. But Pfeiffer noted such blast-wave clouds, known to weapons researchers as a "Wilson Cloud," are made when humid air gets compressed and causes the water in it to condense. In other words: They aren't unique to nuclear bombs.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation
reshared on Twitter by Narang suggests the blast was equivalent to around 240 tons of TNT, or about 10 times as large as the US military's "
mother of all bombs" or MOAB is capable of unleashing. By contrast, the "Little Boy" bomb that the
US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was about 1,000 times as powerful.
CONTINUED:
Though the explosion that has killed dozens and injured thousands had some features of an atomic blast, it lacked two key characteristics.
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