Nuke your hometown (or any town for that matter)

The brilliant minds at Carlos Labs have put together this neat app using Google Maps and Javascript. Ever wonder what would happen if a nuclear weapon went off in the heart of your hometown? Just enter the address (city name or ZIP/postal code works fine) into Ground Zero. Then select the explosive yield: anything from the Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima, to the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb (the most powerful detonation in recorded history). Or if you're feeling particularly genocidal, select an asteroid impact. Ground Zero calculates the thermal damage and projects it outward from your given hypocenter...

So according to this gimmick, if a device on the scale of Tsar Bomba were to go off in the middle of downtown Reidsville, North Carolina, it would not only destroy all of Rockingham County, but it would also effectively sterilize an area stretching from Martinsville across the line in Virginia, to the outskirts of Thomasville south of Greensboro, and from Winston-Salem to the west and across I-40 to Mebane (yup, you're gone too Burlington).

Just... wow.

Categories: carlos labs, nuclear weapons, technology