Yahoo News New interactive map shows what would happen if a nuclear bomb hit your town
Four million dead, hundreds of square miles burning, and a plume of radiation settling over a huge area.
That’s what would happen if the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated was dropped on south London, according to a new map by Outrider Foundation.
The map uses data gathered by Alex Wellerstein, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Like his previous NUKEMAP app, it calculates casualties (both dead and injured) and areas affected by heat and radiation, based on the weapon used.
Users can opt for one of four bombs: the ‘Little Boy’ dropped on Hiroshima, a Hwasong-14, as used by North Korea, an American W-87, or the ‘Tsar Bomba’, the bigbgest nuclear weapon ever detonated.
The bomb – known variously as the ‘Tsar Bomba’, or more fondly as ‘Big Ivan’ – was a 100 megaton hydrogen bomb, weighing 27 metric tons.
The 26-foot long device was attached to a parachute which itself weighed a ton, to give the aircrews time to fly away from the blast.
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Even so, the plane which dropped ‘the Tsar’ fell a kilometre when the shockwave hit it, as the bomb created a fireball five miles wide.
The flash was visible six hundred miles away.
The explosion is thought to have been 1,500 times as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs put together, and ten times as powerful as all the bombs detonated in World War 2.
One observer described seeing a white flash, and then a rumble ‘as if the Earth had been killed.’
