Technology

Decade-old nuclear-blast simulating website popular again

'Pretty much every nation with an outgoing internet connection has had at least one visitor to NUKEMAP'

Tech Desk March 06, 2022

Decade-old nuclear blast simulator, Nukemap is trending again, coinciding with nuclear war fears in the wake of Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Created in February 2012, by Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Nukemap allows users to model the explosion of nuclear weapons (contemporary, historical, or of any given arbitrary yield) on virtually any target of their choice.

According the Numemap blog, after the user specifies the detonation information, it calls upon a nuclear effects library which outputs distances for various effects of the bomb. These distances are then translated into coordinates that the Google Maps API can understand (either circles of fixed radii or more complicated fallout polygons), and then displayed through the Mapbox interface.

The casualty estimator then uses an ambient population density database to query the number of people who are within various distances of ground zero, and applies a model of casualties to those raw numbers.

If you are having trouble connecting to NUKEMAP right now (it is overwhelmed with traffic a lot of the time), you can use this authorized mirror of it: https://t.co/QADzsUO49m
— Alex Wellerstein (@wellerstein) February 28, 2022

According to Wellerstein, who blogged about the interactive map website: "Pretty much every nation with an outgoing internet connection has had at least one visitor to NUKEMAP, which is a little amazing and overwhelming, even more so since NUKEMAP is in English." The10 countries most of the NUKEMAP users come from are as follows:

United States of America, 14.2 million users (34% of total)

United Kingdom, 2.4 million (7.5%)

Canada, 1.4 million (4.4%)

Germany, 1.1 million (3.5%)

Russia, 1.1 million (3.3%)

Australia, 977K (3%)

France, 856K (2.6%)

Poland, 633K (1.9%)

Spain, 582K (1.8%)

Brazil, 572K (1.8%)

The most popular selection by users according to Wellerstein, is 'King of the Bombs' — the Tsar Bomba with its maximum design yield (100 Mt) with over 81 million simulations by itself (37% of the total detonations).