So with the Chernobyl miniseries, I saw a lot of radiation poisoning discourse, but something I only see mentioned by a few commenters in secondary texts, so I assume wasn’t heavily featured, and honestly isn’t often treated in even nuclear war stories…

Is “walking ghost phase” (or “walking dead”). Radiation damages cells’ DNA, so they can’t replace themselves, but the ones “in service” still more or less function until they individually die. So the first loss will be the cells in the body that have to reproduce the most frequently, which is the lining of the digestive system and the gut flora it’s symbiotic with.

So at first you’ll be horribly sick with diarrhea and vomiting but that’ll clear, and then you’ll be basically functional for a while until your other organ systems run down, probably immune next, opening you to the kind of infections that normally only take in corpses.

So, from like the Korean War to the Fulda Gap ‘80s when the Cold War great powers were gaming out the battlefield use of nuclear weapons against armed ground formations, a concern was how to balance out the maximum kill per warhead against the fact that enemy troops that got a lethal-but-not-immediately dose might spend a few weeks as a rotting-alive but still functional zombie army completely unleashed by the absence of any hope of self-preservation