With a lot of population and geographic population distribution data out there today, Outrider has created a nuclear blast simulator where you can nuke any place you like, with one of four nuclear weapon types! The idea is not to be morbid, or take out any aggression here. Just to be aware of what nuclear war could entail.

With that in mind, I went and nuked my home city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to see what would happen. We had the Halifax Explosion here about 100 years ago, on December 6th, 1917, that was the largest man-made explosion before nuclear weapons, so I have some context for comparison. I chose the W-87 warhead out of the 4 possible choices for best likelihood should nuclear war break out. This was among the 4 choices of the Little Boy atomic bomb used against Japan in WWII (20 kiloton TNT yield), North Korean ICBM (150 kt), W-87 US ICBM (300 kt), some ridiculously huge Russian bomb (50,000 kt) not every city would get hit by unlike ICBMs that could hit most cities, but which had been detonated in tests.

In the Halifax Explosion on December 6, 1917, the yield was 2.9 kt. There were about 2,000 killed and 9,000 injured, in a city far from developed like today. Infrastructure would also be different. Compared to the numbers in the screen capture graphic below, I think a “holy sh*t!” reaction is fairly warranted despite proper civility.

I followed up with a few much more populated cities to see what the numbers were. Again, just to be aware because I chose NY and LA, two cities which I love to visit! With them, an upgraded “holy f*ck!!!” reaction could fairly be justified… and that’s just with the W-87. I don’t doubt they might get that Russian Mother of all nuclear bombs, for which I didn’t want to see the numbers! The numbers seen above were more than horrible enough to think about!

 

Wanna see your city nuked, or some other place?

Just go to the Outrider site and input the location. It seems to have a huge list of places in its database. You can also choose the warhead, of course. You’ll have to wait as I did for Halifax if you were the first one to run it in the area, with the response for places others have tried seeming to be much faster (NY and LA when I got around to it just now).

The tool is a pretty interesting one, albeit still a bit unemotionally disconnected. Real pictures of a few thousand dead bodies in morgues, horribly injured people, nuclear fallout victims like deformed new borns for decades afterward, would bring it a lot closer to home. Thinking about some I’ve seen over the years as I write this has me welling up enough I am hoping I am not making any typos here.

Great job to create some awareness, though, Outrider!