The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Notably: The site is called Nukemap. You can access it here. When I do, it brings up Orlando. I don;t know if it’s because the website is reading my IP address or if Nukemap is set to Orlando getting blown off the map by default. Nukemap is a nuclear bomb simulator. You choose any city you like, including Palm Coast. Then you select the kind of warhead you want to drop on the city–the yield, in kilotons or megatons.  Let’s take the 15-kiloton Little Boy type of bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima as an example. You can then choose whether you want an airburst, which causes more damage but limits radioactive waste in the air, or a surface burst, which limits damage but throws up a bigger radioactive cloud. You can click the box to give you an idea of casualties. You can click the box about radioactive fallout. Then you detonate. The result is a basic map of concentric circles of damage. The bomb would have been dropped on the C Section, as this simulation has it (not my choice, but whatever.) The result is surprisingly slight: 3,570 fatalities, 7,560 injuries, with the fireball extending to a radius of just 198 meters and the heavy blast damage to less than a quarter of a mile. The radiation radius takes in the whole C Section, and the moderate blast damage goes out almost 9 kilometers, or about 5 miles, past Palm Coast Parkway but not to State Road 100, and to U.S. 1, but not past it. The Hammock Beach Resort would also be toast. The thermal radiation radius, where everyone would get third degree bruins and die, but in a longer time stretch, would go out to the F Section and part of the barrier island. A Nagasaki-size bombs would up the casualties to 3,890. A 9 megaton warhead, the kind currently arming American ICBMs, would wipe out half of Palm Coast’s population and reach to St. Augustine and Ormond Beach. I imagine the simulator is designed to scare the hell out of us, and to some extent it does. But I find it not effective enough, and oddly understated. Those casualty figures seem low, and the blast zones smaller than I’d have imagined unless the megatonnage is in play. Oddly, when I dropped another Little Boy on Hiroshima, the simulator showed zero casualties. It had to be refreshed. Then came the casualties: similar to the numbers from the original bombing: close to 100,000 from the blast, 147,000 more injuries. A Hiroshima-sized bomb On Manhattan? 305,000 and 578,000. A thermonuclear warhead? 3.6 million dead, 3.2 million injuries. That’s more along the lines of the likely scenarios, though even those figures seem low–nothing like those in, say, The Fate of the Earth’s scenario of a bomb on Manhattan. Here. Try for yourself. 

—P.T.

 

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And to think, just a few months prior, Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves had assured the public and Congress that death by radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.”

–From Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024).
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