Nuke your home town! (virtually, of course)

[lpetrich]

I nuked Morris, Minnesota tells about What if your hometown were hit by the Hiroshima atomic bomb? | Public Radio International Select a spot and it will overlay what area will suffer what damage, ignoring blocking of line of sight by hills.

The Rare Photo of the Hiroshima Mushroom Cloud That Was Found In an Elementary School - The Atlantic
From that article,

Yet even given the delay between the flash of light, the sound, and the explosion, Siemes and his colleagues went to the front of the house to see where the bomb landed. All of the survivors he later encountered had the same impression “that the bomb had burst in their immediate vicinity.” The fact that one massive bomb, kilometers away, could cause this sort of force and devastation defied belief.

“Everybody is running around saying, ‘Oh, it’s weird, my house randomly got hit by a bomb,’” Wellerstein describes it. “When the answer is, no, no, no—you guys are actually fairly far away from the bomb and it was only one bomb. It was huge.”

“I’ve always thought that that was a powerful illustration of how long it takes your brain to wrap around something that is just so unfamiliar,” he continued.

The person who took this photo would have been among the first to look out there and realize that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill bomb. It wasn’t the air raid that the citizens of Hiroshima had been anticipating for months. This was the beginning of a new world, one with a bomb unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before, something so new and fearsome that at first no one could understand what it was.

Fortunately, only one other city was ever attacked with a nuclear bomb: Nagasaki.

NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein -- more customizable. You call go all the way up to the Soviet Union's "Tsar Bomba".

 

[Nice Squirrel]

We used to have such maps pinned to the bulletin boards in schools in the 1970-80s. I would tease the kids who would lived in a zone where they would not be instantly vaporized as they would feel pain.

 

[Jayjay]

We used to have such maps pinned to the bulletin boards in schools in the 1970-80s. I would tease the kids who would lived in a zone where they would not be instantly vaporized as they would feel pain.

Fun fact: that zone is anything beyond a few yards from ground zero. The heat wave from the explosion doesn't vaporize you, it just sets you on fire, and the farther away from the center you are, the longer it takes for the blast wave to finally reach you and kill you.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

On tryng this I was surprised how weak the blast was. I thought it would reach a lot further than that. If I nuke downtown Toronto, I'm perfectly safe in Mississauga?

 

[bilby]

We used to have such maps pinned to the bulletin boards in schools in the 1970-80s. I would tease the kids who would lived in a zone where they would not be instantly vaporized as they would feel pain.

Of course, those maps assume a LOT about the ground-zeros for incoming nukes.

Most of them were generated to give a 'worst case' result - deliberate targeting of population centres, using large (1 - 5 megaton range) ground-burst weapons, resulting in massive fallout. While it is not impossible that a retaliatory strike might have such a profile, it doesn't seem very likely; and a first strike would surely be either a counter-force strike, targeting military infrastructure (airfields and ICBM silos) and/or a 'decapitation' strike aimed at Command and Control and/or the heads of Government. Such attacks would have a very different profile, and built up areas (perhaps excluding capital cities) might well be left relatively untouched.

I remember seeing just such a map when I was in high school, back in the 1980s, giving the effects of a 1MT groundburst bomb aimed at Leeds town hall. Quite why the town hall would be an aim point eludes me; but even if it were, it seems unlikely that the Soviets would hit it on-the-nose; and if they missed by a few hundred metres, the effects could be quite different, so there would be no guarantee that a particular home or suburb would see a particular effect. A strike aimed at a city would more sensibly be an air-burst, so the fallout pattern would be very different. Ground-bursts are a waste of energy; unless you are aiming for a hardened military target, an air burst does far more damage for a given size of bomb.

A realistic attack would see airbursts over military airfields, and ground bursts at ICBM locations and hardened military facilities (such as NORAD). Straight up bombing of cities to wipe out the civilian population makes no strategic sense, and would presumably only occur as an act of revenge - such an attack makes no sense at all as a first strike option.

Of course, if your enemy has SLBMs, no first strike option can reasonably be expected to prevent a retaliatory strike, rendering any such attack senseless. Which is likely why the Cold War never kicked off into a hot war.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Ahh... I see this was for a Hiroshima bomb. We had one for a thermonuclear blast.

 

[bilby]

Ahh... I see this was for a Hiroshima bomb. We had one for a thermonuclear blast.

The linked site allows you to pick from a range of different warheads. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were pretty small, as nukes go.

One interesting thing is how little difference the size of the device makes above the 1-5MT range - the 50MT Tsar Bomba doesn't do anywhere CLOSE to ten times the damage of a 1MT bomb, much less 50 times as you might expect.

Lots of smaller bombs are far more effective than a few large ones. If you need a 5psi overpressure to demolish a house, then a 50psi overpressure doesn't demolish it any more effectively.

 

[beero1000]

Yea, the second ever nuclear bomb in history was awesome for its time, but isn't all that impressive today. After all, we've had 70 years to make them bigger and better.

 

[beero1000]

Ahh... I see this was for a Hiroshima bomb. We had one for a thermonuclear blast.

The linked site allows you to pick from a range of different warheads. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were pretty small, as nukes go.

One interesting thing is how little difference the size of the device makes above the 1-5MT range - the 50MT Tsar Bomba doesn't do anywhere CLOSE to ten times the damage of a 1MT bomb, much less 50 times as you might expect.

Lots of smaller bombs are far more effective than a few large ones. If you need a 5psi overpressure to demolish a house, then a 50psi overpressure doesn't demolish it any more effectively.

Plus, the explosion's energy dissipates in 3D, while most of the target damage is done by the small slice that makes contact with the surface.

 

[ZiprHead]

Hmmm. For some reason, it doesn't work for me. I can bring up the map of the location I choose but it won't mark the target.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Hmmm. For some reason, it doesn't work for me. I can bring up the map of the location I choose but it won't mark the target.

I had that problem on my work computer, which I suspect was due to the browser on that machine. It worked better at home.

 

[bigfield]

...

 

[Tigers!]

I tried Sussex St, Sydney (hq of NSW labour). The damage was depressing limited.

 

[dystopian]

If downtown Amsterdam got hit, I'd be just outside the window breaking range. If the Tsar bomba was detonated over downtown Amsterdam as an airbust I would be just within the airblast radius and just outside it if it was a surface detonation. At least I'm outside the likely fallout path; assuming only Amsterdam gets hit, which would be unlikely. It bothers me that the sites don't use the same damage metric; the 2nd site doesn't list any effects for the hiroshima bomb that extend beyond 2KM; giving the impression that you could nuke downtown without doing anything to the rest of the city.