A nuclear bomb map has been created to demonstrate what would happen if one detonated in your area.
Discussions around the threat of nuclear war have escalated since Russia invaded Ukraine, and as recently Russian president Vladimir Putin's reaction to Sweden and Finland's potentially joining NATO.
Some people have diverged on whether Putin would ever go so far as to use the powerful weapon, with some calling them "empty threats," while others say that the threat is potentially real.
Per the Independent, last week, Putin's ally Andrey Gurulyov said on Russian TV that if they wanted to trigger World War III, they would.
Gurulyov declared: "We’ll destroy the entire group of the enemy’s space satellites during the first air operation. No one will care if they are American or British; we would see them all as Nato."
So, in case of a nuclear war outbreak, there are tools available that will reveal what would happen if a nuclear bomb was dropped on your city. One of these is NUKEMAP, which was created by Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
The simulator is designed to calculate the consequences of bomb strikes. To activate it, you drag the map to your specific location or choose from one of the presets and then select from which bomb is going to be dropped.
Creator Wellerstein spoke to Newsweek about his invention and explained that the aim of the tool was so people can simply understand nuclear explosions, with the use of online mapping software.
"We live in a world where nuclear weapons issues are on the front pages of our newspapers on a regular basis, yet most people still have a very bad sense of what an exploding nuclear weapon can actually do," Wellerstein said in a statement on the simulator website.
"Some people think they destroy everything in the world all that once, some people think they are not very different from conventional bombs. The reality is somewhere in between: nuclear weapons can cause immense destruction and huge losses of life, but the effects are still comprehendible on a human scale," he added.
Wellerstein emphasizes that the NUKEMAP model can only provide estimates and is only as efficient as the data it relies on - which is to say, not flawless.
Some aspects that could make a distinction when it comes to calculating casualty numbers and, for example, the size of a given blast, may not be examined in the simulation.
