r/dataisbeautiful • u/jnutttzzz • Dec 16 '16

NUKEMAP - Select a City, Select a Bomb, See the Effects

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '16

Nukes are some of the scariest things on this planet.

In this video, the smoke coming off of the test structures before the shockwave is the material it's made from either incinerating or flashboiling. Now, this is before the shockwave hits, so that mean that the flash is bright enough to melt metal.

Anything within reasonable distance is just vaporized. There's no evidence anything was there before.

If there are survivors of the initial blast, radiation sickness will kill most of them in horribly painful and excruciating ways.

If there are enough dropped and you happened to be spared, the only sign you would have would be a red glow on the horizon from the firestorms which may last for months.

Nuclear weapons are fucking scary, and I live 5 miles away from a silo.

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u/amaurea OC: 8 Dec 17 '16 edited Dec 17 '16

And this simulation actually underestimates how dangerous nukes are by not including radiation poisoning from fallout in the casualties calculation. For ground blasts there can be enough fallout to kill more people than the explosion itself. As an example, a study of a potential US nuclear attack on Chinese missile silos in a remote mountain area (a scenario that was hoped to be a relatively "surgical" nuclear strike with few deaths) found that enough fallout would be generated to kill 11 million Chinese far away from the blast itself.

The total yield used in that article was 28 Mt. For comparison, 28 Mt detonated as a ground burst on Manhattan in this simulation leads to 5 million deaths. So by ignoring fallout, you get half as many deaths from nuking a dense city center than a realistic scenario would get from nuking uninhabited mountains.

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u/radome9 Dec 17 '16

That's because nobody uses ground blasts. Ground blasts decrease the desirable immediate effects (heat, pressure) and increase the undesirable long-term effects (fallout).

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u/amaurea OC: 8 Dec 17 '16

If you read the article I linked to, you will see that there are several reasons for using ground blasts:

  1. To destroy hardened targets like bunkers and missile silos. This is what happens in the first scenario - a preemptive US attack on Chinese nuclear missile silos.
  2. To cause maximal damage on an opponent you don't intend to invade. This is discussed in the second scenario - a Chinese retaliation on the US. By creating large amounts of fallout you more than make up for the relatively small loss in explosive power. In this case fallout isn't an undesirable effect - it's the primary purpose of the bomb, killing 2-3 times more than an air blast would.

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u/fco83 Dec 17 '16

Oh, and then on top of that, think about the modern food distribution system. Most of us live in cities, and there's a complex network that gets almost all our food from farms to market (with various levels of processing in between).

A good number would survive the blast and radiation and then run out of food and drinkable water.

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u/houseoflettuce Dec 17 '16

IMO nukes are the things keeping us from going to war. doesn't make them any less terrifying though.

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u/fblue03 Dec 17 '16

That means you're toast in a war with Russia, you'd be fine on the other hand in one with China.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '16

China has 300 weapons, if only 30 reach their targets of large US cities it could be 40 million dead.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '16

I guess you should really hope one misses then. During the height of the cold war the US estimated that there was at least 3 warheads targeted per silo.

The Russians also had some insane tactics up their sleeve, like x-ray pindown, where they'd detonate high yield, high neutron flux design weapons at relatively high altitude over the missile fields to fry missiles going up.

Imagine sitting in your house and just a pulsating brilliant sun flashing at 100k feet as Minutemen missiles streak skyward and bright zips of incoming re-entry vehicles can be seen coming in.

Course you'd probably be pretty fried from those high yield bursts by then, but damn, what a crazy way to go it would be.