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Ever Wondered What Would Happen if Your City was Nuked?
- noelchurchill 16y agoIt looks bad, but not as bad as I always imagined.
- Symmetry 16y agoThese are relatively tiny nukes coming in one at a time - the sort of thing we might see if attacked by North Korea or Iran in 10 years. The fusion weapons used by the USSR were fifty to five thousand times as powerful.
- Zaak 16y agoAlso, the USSR wouldn't have used them one at a time.
- VladRussian 16y agodo you think that the 0.5Kt test in North Korea was a success of a small nuke, not a failure of a bigger one :)
- tomjen3 16y agoI do - North Korea isn't going to nuke anybody, ever. They need insurance that the US won't invade them.
- tomjen3 16y agoI am not so sure they where tiny - even at the scale of the Chineese bomb, the windows where I live wouldn't even be shattered; yet I used to commute longer than that (in fact past what would be ground zero) by bike.
- Pinckney 16y agoIt seems to be about right--the predicted damage to Hiroshima from Little Boy matches up pretty well with observed damage (see http://www.atomicarchive.com/Maps/HiroshimaMap.shtml http://www.atomicarchive.com/Maps/HiroshimaMap.shtml) I think it's just a very different geographic scale of the cities involved. We learn that Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb; we don't often hear that Hiroshima is tiny in comparison to e.g. LA (which would require something on the scale of Tsar Bomba, or multiple strikes, to destroy it to a similar degree).
- Someone 16y agoAlso, as the bombing of Tokyo showed, one didn't need an atomic bomb to flatten a Japanese city of the time. Japanese housing was very flimsy (probably because of the earthquake risk; you either build something tat withstands a quake, or something that will not hurt you when it falls down on you). Bamboo and rice paper provide very limited coverage from any blast, burn very well, and leave almost nothing.
- dstorrs 16y agoAlso, Hiroshima was built mostly out of wood and paper -- supposedly, the fires killed a huge number of people who weren't killed directly by the bomb.
- whyenot 16y agoThis doesn't take topography into account. I suspect that would be fairly important for some cities like San Francisco.
- hga 16y agoIndeed. While I haven't checked up on any recent research or findings, as of the '70s/80s it was thought that though Nagasaki was hit by a slightly more powerful bomb than Hiroshima, it suffered less due to its hilly terrain. (The biggest difference, though, was due to the latter resulting in a firestorm, and outside of perhaps Somerville, MA there are very few US cities with enough fuel per area for one of those to develop).
- icegreentea 16y agoRemember, with all of the smaller nukes, you're suppose to get smothered by like 8 warheads at the minimum. Well, says the Cold War anyways.
- Goronmon 16y agoIn case anyone misses it (took me a bit to find), there is a weapon selector under the bottom left edge of the map to choose different sizes of nukes.
- webXL 16y agoTsar Bomba is my favorite. Is the developer making a political statement by defaulting the map to D.C.?
- rdl 16y agoI really hope this isn't an Ender's Game kind of thing...
- pyre 16y agoIt's hard to compare the magnitude of each bomb because it keeps changing the zoom level every time I click 'Nuke it!' again. edit: also, why is the fallout so distorted when changing wind directions between east/west and north/south?
- jwegan 16y agoUncheck the autozoom checkbox to keep the same perspective.
- Anechoic 16y agoAnother perspective: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html (kinda long, but worth the read)
- stretchwithme 16y agoI think it would hot and windy. And a bit noisy as well.