Daaang Bro Went All Out With This One

daaang bro went all out with this one

Hi, I’m A.D., I’m a historian, and let’s talk about the nuclear bomb and why the one that exploded at the end of QSMP’s Purgatory Event probably didn’t kill all that many people upon initially exploding.

The nuclear bomb, as everybody knows, has only ever been used in a war twice. Both explosions were caused by the United States in their war against Japan at the tail end of World War Two in one final terrible last ditch attempt at ending the war through any means necessary.

Pictured above are the atomic explosions at Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right.)

These are big huge clouds, which makes sense! Nuclear weapons, on average, have the strength of somewhere between 10 and 50 megatons of TNT. Hydrogen bombs, meanwhile, are WAY worse, with the first test coming in at a whopping 10 MILLION tons of TNT.

To put it in Minecraft terms for all you nerds out there, imagine Doomsday from the Dream SMP and how it razed an entire nation to bedrock level by using somewhere in the range of 20 stacks of TnT (if I’m remembering correctly.) A nuclear bomb, in these terms, would have blown L’Manberg up something like eight times over and then some.

So that’s. Bad. Right?

Well, here’s the QSMP’s bomb as was constructed by our favorite depressed detective, q!Maximus:

This bomb, notably, is underground. It was never dug up, it was just moved somewhere else. It isn’t above ground, and it never left this room. Watch the cutscene back (linked here), the bomb never left the room.

So this is where underground nuclear testing comes in.

Underground testing began in 1951, and it remains the only form of scientific nuclear testing not banned by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

No big surprise, a lot of early underground tests were conducted by the US out in Nevada, where they kinda tested nukes legit fucking EVERYWHERE in the desert for a long time. Below are some photos, just for funsies:

What’s important about underground nuclear explosions is that they actually end up releasing less radiation into the atmosphere than regular nukes do. What happens beyond that depends on whether or not the radiation remains contained.

A contained explosion’s aftermath:

And an uncontained explosion’s aftermath:

There hasn’t really been many negative biological effects reported from these underground tests, which is really saying something considering how close to nuclear blasts the US had its guys at most of the time (see below)

The worst you got out of the underground tests was some radioactivity in cows’ milk, which is NOTHING compared to the effects of the above-ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Site:

So… what does this mean for the QSMP?

Well, if we’re going off of historical and scientific precedent, legitimately nothing substantial happened to the islands of Purgatory. There’s more of a risk of dying from the pre-established radioactive rain disaster effects as well as the earthquake and meteor disasters.

Fun fact! Underground nuclear explosions usually registered as weaker than actual fault line activity, aka actual earthquakes.

If Maxo’s nuke was dropped from above, the devastation would be greater. Nuclear fallout is no joke; even today, cancer rates in the American West are still pretty high from the above-ground testing conducted at the Nevada Site. The Bikini Atoll will never be the same after all the testing the US did there, either.

But, because this nuke seemed to have gone off underground, I can safely assume that the damage done to the islands above was minimal at worst. Maybe there’s a radioactivity leak, but everybody staying on the islands had already experienced radiation up to that point.

It’s important to remember this because several characters did stay behind on the islands, and the fandom is assuming them dead because, well. A nuke went off. But those characters aren’t dead yet (outside of q!Maxo, who was possibly directly above the nuke when it went off and thus would’ve been hit full-force by the explosion.) Many were on the beach, far from the the nuke. They’re fine, and you can prove it with history!

TLDR; the nuke from the end of Purgatory was assumedly set off underground, which would have negated a lot of its potential damage, so everybody’s fine except for the unfortunately deceased q!Maxo