An earlier version of this article was published in 2016.
The Ukrainian conflict has raised the possibility of a nuclear standoff. One appeased, but plausible after all. As we saw at the time, there are more than eight thousand nuclear bombs capable of destroying all of humanity with a stroke of the pen. Since we know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the tests in unknown regions of the earth carried out decades later, it is possible to know what would happen if all the nuclear warheads were detonated on the same day. And there are those who have decided to take the consequences to a map.
It is the case of alex wellerstein, from the Stevens Institute for Technology in New Jersey. Wellerstein is responsible for Nukemap, a small application that allowed the range of almost all nuclear weapons designs in the world to be tested in any city on earth. The visual results, on the city of oneself, were overwhelming, because not only the possible number of victims was counted, but also the scope of the radiation. Now, Wellerstein has taken advantage of the work of the Future of Life Institute (FLI) to update the app and turn it into a pretty cool map.
How? Thanks to the previous work carried out by the FLI. The organization has accessed the huge archive of nuclear military targets recently released by the National Security Archive. In it, the thousand and one points susceptible to receiving a nuclear attack by the United States during the Cold War, at the heart of the never-concreted hostilities between the Western power and the Soviet Union. Wellerstein has taken that database, given it a nicer shape and added variables based on Nukemap.
Several variables can be observed. One of the most striking is the scope of radiation and the impact of nuclear warheads depending on their power. The most remarkable ever manufactured and tested by America is Castle Bravo (launched over Bikini Atoll, in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean, in 1954), and generated an energy equivalent to fifteen megatons of TNTd. Wellerstein’s supposed map allows us to guess what would have happened with explosions of 10 megatons.
Depending on the bombs, the fatalities would range between 80 million of people and 800 million of people. It is only a model, but it gives an idea of the risk that the human being faces with nuclear weapons. The result of the map is this, applied to Spain: