Radio-exposure due to experimental nuclear explosions

Experimental nuclear explosions, whose military applications were brutally revealed to world public opinion by the destruction of Hiroshima on 5 August, 1945 and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, respectively, have an enormous destructive potential because of the great amounts of energy liberated by them. Energy production in a nuclear explosion is the result of the formation, through the redistribution of protons and neutrons, of new nuclei from the initial nuclei. The forces that hold nucleons in a nucleus are considerably greater than those which exist between atoms of a molecule. This is why, for a given mass, the energy liberated during a nuclear explosion is much greater than that liberated in a classical explosion, in which energy results from a chemical reaction involving a simple rearrangement of the atoms present in the explosive substance