Nuke Map: Interactive Nuclear Bomb Map | Hacker News Reader

Nuke Map: Interactive Nuclear Bomb Map

nuclearsecrecy.com

160 pointsjohnny31387 comments

I spent a couple days obsessed with this shortly after moving to Seattle (from small town Midwest) a few months ago.

Wouldn't mind having something similar for impending mega-earthquakes and tsunamis.

Wait, why did I move here? Oh, I guess I got sold on the rain and the high cost of living. :)

You can combine nuclear speculation with (induced) tsunamis with the (hypothetical) Russian Status-6 Ocean Multipurpose System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

Holy hell. Einstein's quote about World War IV being fought with sticks and rocks wasn't hyperbole.

Well, that's terrifying.

And brilliant. Terrifyingly brilliant.

Terrifying. Brilliant. Terrifyingly brilliant. Brilliantly terrifying.

I realize that the standards for discourse on HN are higher, but in my defense, this weapon terrifies me beyond the capacity for rational thought.

For what it's worth, the Midwest would be a prime target during a nuclear war due to its ICBM silos. There aren't many places far away from both population centers and military targets that could be considered safe. Maybe New Zealand.

I live in Berlin. Used to be targeted by dozens if not over a hundred nukes. Bonus: from both sides.

So over quickly, rather than wasting away from fallout, nuclear winter and the complete and total collapse of civilization.

Exactly.

Would I like to be nuked? No.

Would I like to live out The Road or Mad Max (depending on your preference of atmosphere)? Doubly no.

The cynical truth, though, is that faced with that decision you'd still choose the second option.

Nope, I really wouldn't. I am highly pain-averse. And the point of being targeted by 50+ nukes is that I wouldn't even have to make that choice :-)

Weird, I've found a situation where my insane pain tolerance could help me. (From migraines)

With two kids, "the road" sounds tragically awesome. Okay awesome is the wrong word. But something. Blinking out of existence: ick.

I'm sure that can change your outlook. My first child is scheduled for a fall release, might change my answer.

Doesn't change right away, takes time. But somehow over the last 4.5 years it has. (Ask me before then, yeah absolutely blinking out is the way to go.) Then again, as always, ymmv. Congratulations.

Interesting article at DefenseOne about the Midwest as "nuclear sponge."

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/02/welcome-americas-nuc...

Patagonia is more realistic.

Not even... Falklands are just right there..

Inevitably any large population centre is going to have nearby military defences, so any large population centre is a target, right?

With that many nuclear weapons existing... Who cares?

(People wondering if they have a hope of survival by fleeing somewhere preëmptively, though I don't know if that's noble…)

> I got sold on the rain

So sorry for no rain in last 54 days. ;)

Haha this always doesn't get the credit it's worth, from what I hear. The haze lately is weird though.

There exist expected inundation maps for the Washington coast I believe, due to the threat of that mega tsunami earthquake.

I'm really glad this one keeps making the rounds. Of course this is not even close to the first time this has been posted but I always continue going back to it after all these years.

Question: If I understand this correctly, it means all one would have to do is move 30-60 mins away from the center of a suspected target city to massively increase one's chances of surviving an attack on said city?

(From 20mt NK strike, for example)

Assuming a single warhead and something small like NK's ICBMs which is in the 20-30kt range, yes. Now when you're dealing with modern ICBMs, like the ones the US, Russia, China and a few other countries have, the prognosis isn't as good. Modern ICBMs are MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle). For example the current Russian MIRV ICBM is the R-36M2 (NATO designation SS-18 Satan Mod 5) which carries 10 warheads each with a charge of 550-750kt. So on Nukemap punch in a single air-burst warhead in the 550-750kt range and imagine 10 of them spread over a wide area. That's what a single R-36M2 could do. Russia currently has 104 of them deployed. They also have 278 of the older R-36MUTTKh (NATO SS-18 Satan Mod 4) deployed which each carry 10 550kt warheads. Russia is in the process of deploying the successor to the R-36M, the RS-28 Sarmat (NATO designation SS-X-30 SATAN 2) which can carry a single warhead with a 50Mt charge or between 10-15 MIRV warheads or 24 hypersonic glide vehicles, depending on the configuration. A single RS-28 Sarmat in a MIRV or hypersonic glide vehicle configuration could flatten an area about the size of Texas. And if all that isn't horrific enough, it's hypersonic, which means all current missile defenses are useless against it.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-rs-28-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat

I did the calculation for Ohio-class capabilities assuming it was only loaded with the smaller 100kT warheads (W76), as the 450kT ones (W88) are relatively rare, according to Nukemap's estimates for a 840m airburst a single sub can cover 1500sq km (~1/3rd of RH, 10x DC) in 20psi (severe damage or complete destruction of concrete buildings, ~100% fatality), 1800 in 1000 rem (~95% protracted mortality) and 7700 sq km (Delaware, half of Connecticut) in 5 psi (~universal collapse of residential buildings, widespread fatalities).

MIRV are fucking terrifying.

> MIRV are fucking terrifying.

I agree. How one can work on such things is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Because terrifying the hell out of any potential nuclear opponent is the most stable configuration we've arrived at.

Aside from "no one has large nukes", which was never geo-politically practical once the USSR reached parity w/ the US.

But at the same time, we're moving past deterrence. The USSR fell 26 years ago. There's "deterrence" and there's "we can wipe out the entire planet". It's especially disconcerting when you consider that in most nuclear armed countries, US included, the authority to launch a nuclear strike lies solely with one person.

We are in no way moving past deterrence. SALT, START, ABMT, etc essentially codified it.

And deterrence is predicated upon creating the absolute certainty in your enemy's mind that you will leave their country a smoking, radioactive hellscape if they attack you.

This requires convincing them that the decision will be made, were it to come to that. Not "Oh, but a mid level officer might ignore the command."

In nuclear game theory, the less certain your opponent is of your resolve and capability, the more likely nuclear armageddon is.

What does nuclear game theory say about probabilities as usage as more and more countries create their own arsenals?

I'd imagine it makes it less stable simply from a complexity = narrower bounds of stability standpoint, but fundamentally it doesn't change anything.

That's why nuclear fingerprinting and global monitoring have been so heavily invested in. "Safety in numbers" isn't a defense if the retaliatory strike still hits all the belligerents.

You vastly overestimated the dammage from a MIRV. Nukes are sub liner as a higher percentage of the energy ends up in the upper atmosphere as you increase yield. Nagasaki's Was 20kt and had favorable geographic conditions along with wooden buildings and a large number of people from the same city survived. 500kt still have left survivors in the same city though few.

So, yes a MIV could take out 8-10 cities across Texas while not impacting 99% of the land. But, a more likely approach is to carpet bomb suberbs and redundantly target cities with different warheads from different ICBMs.

Thus, 1000 MIRVs would not get 1000x the dammage as single areas would be targeted multiple times and of course targets get harder to pick. Central West Virginia for example due to all those mountains and minimal population would take a lot of nukes or largely get left alone.

> So, yes a MIV could take out 8-10 cities across Texas while not impacting 99% of the land. But, a more likely approach is to carpet bomb suburbs and redundantly target cities with different warheads from different ICBMs.

Why? Wouldn't it be more useful from a militaristic perspective to take out enemy missile silos, industrial plants which could be converted to produce wartime materials, and to take out military bases? Essentially, target cities, ignore the residential areas except for ones that are near a missile silo? What strategic advantage could possibly come from carpet bombing suburbs?

The world only has on the order of a thousand of these things. Russia, as the GP points out, only has ~300. They can't just glass the opposing hemisphere, they have to pick and choose important targets.

Total war, if you reduce the US population from 300 million to 10 million we are a vastly smaller threat mid term. Consider, if you removed everything but 1,000,000 infantry they would need to go make food, bullets, boats etc. On the other hand if you have 100 million civilians they can quickly train a few % how to shoot and will be very angry while producing a surplus to keep a war going.

The general assumption is an ICBMs counter attack happens when your attack is in the air. So, you would mostly be hitting empty silos thus your country has little military or economic strength left. Worse, it's much cheaper to fake some silos in the middle of nowhere than a suburb. 'Wasting' nukes on corn fields is very costly.

Massive fear

How has a 500kt warhead left survivors in a city? No warheads or bombs that large have ever been deployed in an actual conflict and so have never been used on a city.

bad edit should be: 500kt would still have

The 100% kills zone is surrounded by a much larger 99-95% kill zone. Militarily 98% = total destruction, but when you start talking about 100,000 people you need several 9's.

Note that the RS-28 Sarmat is still a couple years away. "Deploying" is a bit of a stretch, no? Almost finished prototyping is how I'd assess it.

Though I'm not sure it matters either way, if Russia wants to end the world, they can.

I should have said developing. I'm still drinking my coffee over here, just woke up.

Yes - unless there are ground bursts generating fall out, and the wind is blowing in your direction.

The only way to survive fall out is to stay in a shelter with good shielding for an absolute minimum of two weeks. In an all-out war in which most cities are attacked, that could easily extend to months, or even a year.

Unless you have a Geiger counter or dosimeter you won't realise you've been irradiated, and it can take two to four weeks for a fatal dose to kill you.

For the first part of that you may well feel absolutely fine.

However, if I understand correctly, you will have a golden window of opportunity of half an hour or so while the fallout is still mostly in the air. It's probably possible to escape the fallout zone on a cycle if you start moving ASAP perpendicular to the wind direction.

Perpendicular, not up wind?

Edit: figured it out- if you are already in the plume, then you need to move perpendicular to the wind direction to leave it quickest.

If you are already up wind from the blast, then I'd keep moving up wind (which is then both up wind and away from ground zero).

Does that sound right?

Exactly right!

Considering that there is almost zero public shelters anywhere in the western world nowadays, if a nuke goes off nearby I'd say it's a good bet you're dead even if you survive the blast.

On the contrary - if a single nuclear weapon explodes and you survive the immediate effects not too badly injured I'd say there is a very good chance that you'd survive. Of course, for an attack with thousands of weapons there would be other problems but that's not the scale of the threat to the US from NK.

why would you need public shelter? i have relatively big cellar in basement of my apartment building where I could squeeze my family, so does my mother, while my father's cellar is like 4x5m, he could stay there with many people

only when I think of my sister who built house without basement or same goes for cousin, I guess they don't stand much chance

we really need remake of Threads

Well, for starters, I currently live in the UK and I don't know anyone who lives in a building with a basement. They are just not very common here. And second of all - even if you do have a basement - do you have any supplies in there? Air filters? Fresh water? It's cool for a day or two, but if you have to stay there for two weeks then it's just not good enough.

Given what the World after will look like it might be better to die quickly though

In the short term at least, but it's probably safe to assume your risks at that distance are from your neighbours fighting over supplies.

Which is not a negligible threat. A major logistical crash will drop your standard of living down to what can be grown or made locally (compare the fall of the Roman empire) and a sudden one (such as a nuclear war) will for a while drop you down to what has already been stored locally - very very little, in this age of just in time delivery. Expect immediate and very violent food riots.

Yes. "Not actually being there" is very useful in this regard, and 60 minutes of commute can get you rather far away.

Pretty much. I live about 15 miles from the White House and my assumption is that I'd probably survive the initial stages of a nuclear war. Weapons have actually been getting a lot smaller in recent decades. At the peak of the Cold War, weapons with tens of megatons of yield were not uncommon. Right now, the biggest bomb in the US arsenal is 1.2 megatons, and most are much smaller. A lot of this is because of accuracy: giant bombs were needed for strategic weapons in the 1960s because you'd be lucky to get such a bomb within a couple miles of your intended target. With modern weapons able to hit a chosen city block (or a chosen room of a building if using GPS guidance) you can use much smaller weapons.

The deadliness of nuclear weapons tends to be overstated at all yields. For example, look at all the ridicule that the old "duck and cover" method gets. It's actually a highly practical method that would save a lot of lives, even with the old gigantic bombs.

Now, don't get me wrong. Nuclear war, or even a single nuclear strike, would kill a shitload of people, and there's some merit to the idea that "the living would envy the dead" that you see a lot of other commenters espousing here. But popular ideas like "one bomb would destroy the entire state of Texas" and "the combined nuclear arsenals of the world are enough to destroy the planet N times over" are completely wrong.

"20mt NK strike"

I seriously doubt if anyone, least of all NK, would be throwing 20Mt bombs at cities - the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile.

The Soviets did have very large missiles (SS-18s) with an option for single very large weapons (20-25Mt) but those were for deep bunkers rather than cities.

> the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile.

It's the opposite. Medium warheads (100~500kT) are more efficient[0] and more flexible, the original systems were huge because they were bomber-delivered, there was therefore an assumption that few bombs would reach the target and you wanted every one of them to pack as much punch as possible (no point in putting lots of small ones in a bomber as they'd all be dropped onto the same place anyway, when your explosion has an effect diameter in kilometres multiple bombs are just going to interfere with one another).

The advent of ICBM and later MIRV allowed splitting reducing the size of individual warheads as the delivery mechanism is both cheaper and more effective, thus you can have more of them and a larger fraction will reach the objective.

[0] ground effects grow sub-linearly with yield, if you increase yield from 20kT to 1MT (50x) the blast range grows by ~4x (changing burst height to optimise ground effects) and the affected area grows by ~15x

What I meant was that once they worked out staging building arbitrarily large weapons was actually fairly easy - AFAIR the team building the Tsar Bomba were criticized by their colleagues because what they were doing wasn't actually useful technically and that the real challenge was building smaller easier to deliver designs - the US W88 currently being the most advanced design that has been described in public.

That must be a typo meaning "20kt"

I don't think many believe NK have thermonuclear weapons so they are at tens of kilotons.

Well, North Korea did claim at the start of 2016 that they had tested an H-bomb:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/12...

However, with a yield of 6kt I don't think what they tested sounded like anyone else's definition of an "H-bomb" (i.e. multi-staged).

Sort of. There are very few scenarios where I can imagine one nuclear bomb being dropped on a US target, accident by our own military seems most likely followed by terrorism then a suicidal nuclear power, and in all three of those scenarios I doubt the bomb would hit where any planning suggests it would.

A nuclear bomb (several hundred times larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima) was accidentally dropped in the US in 1961[1]. Luckily it (obviously) didn't detonate.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bo...

It would depend. Are you talking a single nuke from NK? Then that is plausible depending on wind / fallout directions. I don't remember where the original source for this is, but https://crisisboom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nuke-targets-... is a reasonable scenario for a war with Russia. Where anything with value would be struck. The east coast is practically all destroyed from 50mi south of DC up to north of Boston. Entire metro areas would be struck and you would need to be further out.

Better to quickly evaporate than deal with fighting for food or water. So I would rather move to the center in case nukes start flying around.

The site is down, so I can't tell if it models fallout. Not an expert, but I get the impression that you can get lethal fallout a hundred kilometers from the target site. But it would require very bad luck with regards to the wind direction.

There is a very fascinating book detailing the immediate survival of such a scenario.

I have played quite a lot with it - you typically don't get much fallout with an airburst (you do get more dead people), but in the case of nuclear terroism, which would probably be delivered by truck and therefore be a ground-burst, you do.

You probably also want to be up-wind, so that you don't get any fallout.

But yeah, a single nuke isn't close to an endgame, certainly not those suitcased sized nukes we were all so afraid of. To end the world you need massive numbers of nukes, or live in a small country.

Look like this site has been nuked, oh the irony :(

Ahem. Hacker Nuked.

The only winning move is not to play. Boom!

It's good for driving the point that usually you want lots of small nukes, not a few big ones for maximum damage.

Oh, and yeah, there's also the "surface detonation for maximum mayhem" lesson to be learned.

Highly educational!

I thought you wanted to detonate a bit above the surface to spread out the shock waves, explosion, and not "waste" energy going into the ground?

AFAIK, detonating at altitude is done for fallout reasons. Detonating at the ground would make the fallout much worse.

Airbursts are generally used to maximise the area damaged at the cost of peak damage - so for soft targets like cities. Ground bursts would be used for hard targets (deep bunkers, missile silos) that are relatively small but hard to kill. I suspect in wartime fall-out wouldn't be a major factor in planning all out attacks whereas it was a big factor in atmospheric testing.

I also wonder how dangerous fallout was considered to be, in the long run. I have the impression that up into the late 60s fallout was considered dangerous in the short term but not after say a year.

There are rules of thumb like the 7:10 rule:

https://emilms.fema.gov/IS3/FEMA_IS/is03/REM0504050.htm

Long term effects are tricky because of biological processes concentrating some elements (I think mainly calcium, iodine).

Of course, if you want to get really nasty you can salt your bombs with appropriate elements (notably cobalt) that have long lived nasty isotopes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb

Interesting use of the word "worse".

Noted. Could come in handy at some point!

The author is currently working on a sequel/companion to NUKEMAP: MISSILEMAP.

Truly horrifying

It’s a nice page - I used to use it to illustrate the power of the various weapons in an intro to international politics class I taught. The Tsar Bomba was always a hit with the more morbid students.

just checked it on Beijing where I used to live and it seem only tourist city center would be eliminated with regular weapons, while most of the population outside would be untouched, I was surprised how weak is supposed to be nuclear bomb, I remembered always it was like 10-20km deadly and 50km run away zone, but maybe I am confusing it with nuclear power plant

After recent news, I kind of miss Guam in the preset list.

Morbid

does this site block NK access, I can see Kim Jong Un using this to plan his next move.

does this site block US access, I can see Dolan Trump using this to plan his next move.

At least Harry Truman can't get to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com