This Nuclear Explosion Simulator Shows Just How Screwed We'd Be If Russia Dropped Another Tsar Bomba
For years, one of the more perversely interesting things on the internet has been Alex Wellerstein's NUKEMAP, which — true to its name — shows you the estimated damage if you dropped a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world. Now the Outrider Foundation has released its own, rather more elegant version, and we're back to blowing up our backyards.
Outrider's simulator lets you enter any location and select from a number of bomb strengths, from the 15KT Little Boy (the first nuke used in war) to the 50,000KT Tsar Bomba, which Russia tested in 1961. The simulator estimates the number of casualties and describes what would happen within the various reaches of the blast (radiation, shock wave, etc). To illustrate, we dropped a 300KT W-87, which is a current part of the US nuclear arsenal. And while much of Brooklyn is destroyed, the damage stretches into lower Manhattan and across to New Jersey as well:
So that brings us to Tsar Bomba. If the USSR were to build another Tsar Bomba and detonated the 50,000KT behemoth over the Digg offices in lower Manhattan, how bad would that be? Reader, it would be extremely bad. The simulator estimates that Tsar Bomba would kill over 7.5 million people if it were detonated in an air burst over lower Manhattan, with the heat wave reaching well into New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island:
Go mess around more with the simulator here and pray that this remains a thought experiment forever.