How do atomic bombs kill you?
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That depends on where you are during the explosion, but if you died during the blast, it was the shock of trauma by induced by third degree burns across virtually your entire body, the more severe trauma of your flesh being forcibly torn away from your body, organs being liquefied, and everything else a seriously large explosion can do to a person. In that way, a nuclear bomb isn’t inherently more deadly than the tonnage of TNT that is marked by the kilotons or megatons that are rated on the specific warhead, only that it is an inherently much smaller size than thousands or millions of tons of TNT, and thus easier to actually use as a weapon.
If you survive the initial blast, you run a severe risk of radiation poisoning if you are in the blast zone. This is because bits of whatever radioactive material was used to power the blast get turned to dust and scattered in the explosion, settling far outside the physical blast zone generally. Radiation damage comes from high energy particles hitting our cells and, well, doing damage to them. At high levels of radiation this can manifest early as burns (sunburn is a form of radiation damage to your skin) but lower doses can cause cellular damage that can over time become a cancerous growth.
A bit beyond the point but a fun thing to know: at a certain level of energy hitting your body in the form of pure EM waves of varying frequency, beyond what I believe our bombs can produce right now, can kill you in a way that the author of xkcd described as “you wouldn’t really die *of* anything; at some point in the process your body would just stop being biology and start being physics.”
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