Note
Why Blast Radius Scales With the Cube Root of Yield
Why does blast damage radius scale with the cube root of yield?
Because a blast's energy spreads through a volume, and volume grows with the cube of distance: to get the same overpressure at a larger distance R, you need energy proportional to R³, so R grows as the cube root of the energy. That's Hopkinson–Cranz scaling — a thousand times the yield moves any given overpressure contour only about ten times further out.
The law in one line
Overpressure at distance R from an explosion of yield W depends only on the scaled distance Z = R / W^(1/3). Two explosions produce the same overpressure wherever they have the same Z. Double the radius and you need eight times the yield to reach the same overpressure there.
What that looks like with real numbers
AEON, the weapons-consequence simulator in Shreyansh's The Evolution, builds its air-blast model on this law from the 1 kt reference curve in Glasstone & Dolan, and its test suite checks it against published figures: the cube-root law to 1e-9, the 5 psi radius of a 1 Mt burst at 7.00 km, and the optimum burst height at 178 m for 1 kt versus 1,780 m for 1 Mt — a thousandfold yield, a tenfold height. One exponent is why a single slider can span seven orders of magnitude of yield.
Not every effect follows it
Cube-root scaling is a blast law. Other effects scale differently, which is why a consequence model can't use one radius for everything: thermal fluence falls off with the square of distance plus atmospheric attenuation, prompt radiation follows its own exponential attenuation, and crater radius in AEON scales closer to Y^(1/3.4). Each zone in AEON comes from its own published model for exactly that reason.
Scope
AEON models consequences only — blast, heat, radiation, cratering and fallout — for the same reason public references like The Effects of Nuclear Weapons exist: the numbers are otherwise abstract. It contains no weapon design or targeting information, and its casualty figures are labelled as upper-bound estimates with wide error bars.