A perverse fascination with nuclear fallout and blast radii isn’t that weird. Don’t you want to know how hard you and everything you know is going to disappear from the face of the Earth in the unlikely case that some maniac drops 20 kilotons of atomic death on your front door? Now you can see a simulation of the mushroom cloud that will claim your life — in three dimensions.
We’ve seen several maps that visualise nuclear devastation on the bland two-dimensional canvas of Google Maps. But now nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein — the man who taught us that beer can survive the apocalypse — has translated the experience to a 3D Google Earth map that lets you simulate rapture in clinical detail.
As with Wellerstein’s 2D NukeMap, the new map lets you set the location for Ground Zero, the yield of the bomb in kilotons, and as well as letting you select what facets of the destruction you’d like to see like casualties and fallout. The new map allows you to view the devastation as 3D Google Earth experience complete with animated mushroom cloud, and layers for “effects circles” showing the size of the fireball, radiation cloud, thermal radiation cloud and more. Sheesh, as if we needed more to worry about. [Nuclear Secrecy via Digg]