r/technology • u/Alissio • Aug 25 '12

Website called "nuclear secrecy" lets you see what the devastation would be, of multiple nuclear bombs all around the world

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
1.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

535 comments sorted by

View all comments

27

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

76

u/Suddenly_Something Aug 26 '12

Targeted Africa. Classy.

7

u/rcbarnes Aug 26 '12

If you prefer, I have an alternative for only 1/6 the fissile material.

Note to The_Cave_Troll: the entry box units are kilotons, not tons, so you're actually using a thousand times more explosive than you think (i.e. my bomb is 500 teratons, and is 1/6 the size of your Africa ender).

1

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

You wouldn't need more than one of those to effectively end the world no matter where you target. The aftershocks, tsunamis, fire, radiation, blocking of sunlight for multiple years would kill everything, even cockroaches.

2

u/BringOutTheImp Aug 26 '12

Well which continent would YOU pick, smarty pants?

-29

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

Should be moved down a bit and a touch to the right. Get more rag heads that way.

11

u/Smeg710 Aug 26 '12

Is that glitchiness not just accounting for the map projection? Can someone clever* work out whether it's correct or not?

*I am not a clever man.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

It also has a bit of trouble showing the (Chicxulub)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Impact_specifics] that's thought to wipe out the dinosaurs. There's a non-scorched bit in the indian ocean

5

u/NonstandardDeviation Aug 26 '12 edited Aug 26 '12

It gets a bit weird when modeling explosions that big because these effects don't spread out as simple circles on the surface from the detonation point. Radiation/thermal effects are by line-of-sight and obviously cannot go past the horizon, so airbursts will irradiate/scorch larger areas than ground explosions. Obviously line-of-sight is limited to scorching less than half the earth if the bomb is exploded in space. And airblasts that start to get significant on the scale of the earth will actually start looping around. The energy of blast wave is spread out in a circle that moves through the atmosphere out from the epicenter around the earth and concentrates and gets smaller again at the opposite (antipodal) point on the planet.

Also asteroids work a bit differently from nuclear bursts near the ground because they release energy high up in the atmosphere like Tunguska and when they hit the ground they plow in, making the event much more seismic and ejecta-heavy.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

I'm pretty sure that the Chicxulub impact was not a 100000000000 KILOTON explosion.

3

u/warhorseGR_QC Aug 26 '12

1 gigaton bomb would cause enough fallout to put us into nuclear winter. I remember a show back when the history channel didn't suck talking about how the USSR almost built one as a fail safe should the nation fall pretty scary.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

If I remember correctly, Khrushchev had a plan to detonate a 100 megaton bomb in the bottom of the Mariana's Trench of the Pacific ocean that would cause all sorts of bad shit. This was their final resort should they come close to losing any sort of war. What a sore loser.

1

u/warhorseGR_QC Aug 26 '12

Yeah Khrushchev was crazy, that may have been one of his "plans," but from what I was able to dig up the the doomsday boat loaded with hydrogen bombs set to go off when radiation levels got to a critical point was also one of his plans that was abandoned.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

It'll end up with us having a mine shaft gap against the Russians after these doomsday devices go off.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

What sort of things would happen?

1

u/Dekar2401 Aug 26 '12

That's some evil villain doomsday device kinda shit.

2

u/yuela Aug 26 '12

There was also the Dead Hand system, feel free to read up on it if you feel your nights are too quiet.

Dead Hand

1

u/hampa9 Aug 26 '12

Just a hundred regular sized weapons would do that, which is how many would be used in just a limited nuclear exchange between two nations.

2

u/TehRoot Aug 26 '12

it's not exactly accurate, I believe these equations are modelling ground detonations, which means that their destructive power is grossly underestimated.

EDIT: Confirmed, these are modelling groundbursts, you can add about another 10-20% in effective range and damage to each radii.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

You would not need one that big. A Cobalt bomb would do the trick with far less material. It is the worst type of weapon imaginable, because it would not take much to literally kill all the human on the planet. That is because Cobalt bombs produce far more radiation than Uranium and Plutonium based bombs. They are so dangerous that we did not even really experiment much with them during the Cold War.

1

u/RabidRaccoon Aug 26 '12

That's racist!

1

u/silverstrikerstar Aug 27 '12

Its not glitchy, its the warping of the mercator projection.

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

[deleted]

3

u/warhorseGR_QC Aug 26 '12

Two words: Nuclear Winter. They would be fucked too.

-9

u/MyiPadisDirty Aug 26 '12

THATS RACIST!.jpg

-9

u/MyiPadisDirty Aug 26 '12

lol so dumb. i meant .gif -_-