What Happens to You 6ft from an Exploding Atomic Bomb?

Hotter than the sun is one of those phrases we reach for when we have run out of ways to describe something extreme . It sits alongside faster than a speeding bullet . It's a figure of speech, not a measurement . But the center of the sun sits at around 15 million degrees Celsius or 27 million Fahrenheit . Nothing we could build could ever survive there or even briefly reach it . And yet there is one thing that we have built that does surpass that temperature here on Earth, but only for a fraction of a second, and that's an atomic bomb . So, what would happen if you were standing about 2 m or about 6 and 1/2 ft from one at the instant it detonated ? Not the mushroom cloud, not the blast wave crossing the city, just the first few hundred millionths of a second . Nuclear detonations are not only far more powerful, but much, much quicker than chemical ones . So, what reaches you first ? What happens to the atoms that you're made of ? And would you know ? Why 2 m ? That distance matters, and it's a very different question from Hiroshima or Nagasaki . Those bombs detonated at 580 m, 1,900 ft, and 503 m, 1,650 ft, above ground, respectively . So, even someone standing directly beneath at ground zero was the better part of half a kilometer from the actual point of detonation . To our knowledge, no one has ever been 2 m from an atomic bomb at the moment it went off . It's highly improbable, but not impossible . Something along those lines must have gone through the mind of a young physicist called Donald Hornig on the night of the 15th of July, 1945 . Hornig spent it at the top of a 30-m or 100-ft steel tower in the New Mexico desert sitting beside Gadget, the first . He was there in case anyone tried to sabotage it, and he later recalled wondering what would happen if lightning struck the tower and set it off . The device itself So, what was he sitting next to ? A sphere about 1 and 1/2 m or 5 ft across, wrapped in a cat's cradle of cables, and at the center of it, a ball of plutonium roughly the size of an orange . Getting that plutonium to release its energy was the hardest engineering problem of the entire Manhattan Project . The simple approach, and the one used at Hiroshima, was to fire one piece of uranium into another down what was effectively a gun barrel . Crude, but it worked, and the Americans were confident enough that they never tested it before they dropped it on Hiroshima . Plutonium would not tolerate that . It was produced in reactors at Hanford, and