Nukemap: The Man Behind the Google Maps Mash-Up Which Shows What a Nuclear Bomb Can Do
20th December 2015
I’d typed “Oxford” into the text box, picked my ground zero (Lloyds Bank – don’t ask me why) and my choice of 30 virtual nuclear weapons, clicked on the big red DETONATE button and then watched as a dark stain spread across the Google map towards my favourite pub and my home only 15 minutes’ walk from the city centre. While the pub is hit by a wave of thermal radiation that causes third-degree burns, my house just survives, as do – rather surprisingly – the leafy Victorian suburbs of Summertown, and industrial Cowley, home of the Mini. The casualty figures spin round like a roulette wheel before stopping at 15,430 fatalities and 24,000 injured, out of a population of about 160,000.
This is the hit Google Maps mash-up that calculates the effects of the detonation of a nuclear bomb on a town or city of your choice. It was designed by nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, Assistant Professor for Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and author of the nuclear secrecy blog Restricted Data, to help to fill in the information gap about nuclear weapons that he believes opened up after the end of the Cold War. Since it was launched in 2012, more than two million people have visited the site – 250,000 of those solely on the anniversary of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Now, around 25,000 people a day are seeing a radioactive version of the future.