>>10194352 (LB)
>The videos are being recorded on a digital camera. They would have been fucked up. Correct me if im wrong but you cant detonate even a mini nuke without an EMP right?
Not necessarily, and it depends on the size of the nuclear weapon.
If the weapon used on the Beirut warehouse was a tactical nuke employed by the Israelis, it could have been similar to the smallest tactical nuke in the US arsenal, the B61. This is a thermonuclear device, and could be as little as 600 lbs yield (equivalent to 600 lbs of TNT, not the actual weight of the device). That's still a huge boom, enough to flatten an area of 400 feet in radius.
The EMP generated by a thermonuclear device this size would create a Prompt Gamma Output of about 150 lbs, with an EMP strength of about 700 Volts/Meter at most. That strength falls off at the square root of the distance (linear), so if the videographer were say, 2,000 feet away, the spike would be similar to a lightning strike at a similar distance, not enough to fry even the most sensitive phones.
The blast would be the most dangerous effect, as we saw, but the radiation from that tactical nuke would be no more than a few X-ray's worth at that distance.
It's possible that the weapon was targeting a nuclear device in the warehouse, but the target would not have detonated (a nuclear weapon cannot detonate another nuclear device), just destroyed, and it's nuclear material spread into the atmosphere from the explosion.