nuclear-news

Nuclear bombing: find out how your city would fare – with NUKEMAP

Nukemap: Shall we play a game? cnet, by Daniel Terdiman  February 23, 2012  
Tool shows what would happen if history’s most notorious nuclear weapons were dropped on different cities. It’s scary and sobering–and more than a million people have used it. Want to play god much?

With Nukemap, a new tool that lets anyone test out–on a Google Map–the effects of some of history’s most famous nuclear explosions on cities around the world, you can.

Say you’re inclined to see just how bad the destruction would be in London if “Fat Man,” the second A-bomb dropped on Japan by the Americans during World War II, detonated there. Nukemap lays it all out for you.

Nukemap lets you choose from a long list of cities to experiment with–or drag the map’s marker wherever you want–and then choose either a custom yield in kilotons, or one of a list of famous bombs. When you click the “detonate” button, you quickly see a map with a series of colored circles that show the radii of the fireball, the air blast, the spread of radiation, and the spread of thermal radiation.

It is quite a scary and sobering experience. Indeed, when experimenting with the tool, I couldn’t bring myself to see what would happen to my own city, San Francisco, or to some of my other favorite places, like Paris or New York.

But others clearly aren’t as cowed by this, and already, Nukemap users have generated more than 1 million detonations. “This grimly fascinating Web site allows you to drop everything from Fat Man to Minutemen I warheads to the Tsar Bomba on everywhere from Ulan Bator to Kalamazoo,” Cyriaque Lamar wrote at io9. “I dropped the never-tested 100-megaton Tsar Bomba on the Gawker Media HQ in Manhattan. This was an incredibly stupid decision, as I ended up annihilating my own apartment as well. Didn’t really think that one through.”

In a blog post about the project, creator Alex Wellerstein, a science historian at the American Institute of Physics, said he built the tool because he wasn’t satisfied with any of the other nuclear-effects calculators he’d found online. Wellerstein’s blog is about “nuclear secrecy, past and present.”  http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57383763-52/nukemap-shall-we-play-a-game/#ixzz1nKxKZe6F

February 24, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Resources -audiovicual, technology, USA