Other people don't think a freeze will work. In New York City 1982 half a million people gathered for what was the probably the biggest peace demonstration ever held. The freeze idea found a huge popular support. The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passes a multilateral version of the proposal. Although the freeze idea is a good one but there are still difficulties. There is a problem of verification - making sure that promises are kept at every level. Many experts believe that a freeze would only be successful in the US rather than anywhere else in the world. .
People want to have a complete disarmament because they don't want repeats of Nagasaki and more importantly Hiroshima. People are more concerned about the power of the nuclear bomb and the amount that each nation has. In 1986 at the last count the Americans had 9681 nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union had 8781 warheads. Remember that this figure was made in 1986 and that was 15 years ago. This figure is now grown a little by but by terms and agreements the no is slowly reducing.
What happens when a nuclear bomb explodes? The explosion is separated into three stages, blast, heat and radiation. Half of the total energy of a bomb is released immediately as blast, 35% as heat, 5% as immediate or "prompt- radiation and the rest as long term radiation or "fallout-.
The heat flash comes first. A one-megaton airburst (the equivalent of a million tonnes of TNT exploded in the air) above a city, for example, would produce disabling burns at a distance of 14km and will blind people at 25km away who glanced at the fireball. Those sheltering underground would be cooked like in an oven due to fires breaking out everywhere and creating a firestorm, which will burn at high temperatures for hours.
Fall out is a characteristic, which makes nuclear warfare like no other. The one-megaton burst would only be lethal for a few kilometres but the isotopes formed in the explosion and will fall down to earth after a couple of hours.