Nuclear warheads are terrifying weapons due to their mind-blowing destructive power. As we saw a few weeks ago, they come in two main versions: (1) fission bombs (i.e., they break heavy nucleus--uranium 235 or plutonium 239--to get their energy from) and (2) fusion bombs (i.e., they fuse lightweight atoms--deuterium or tritium--to get their energy from). To depict the devastating effects of these weapons of mass destruction Alex Wellerstein has created the Nukemap simulator. I recommend playing with it--it is a google maps application with a simple graph extension; really easy to use--to get the scale of the destruction. First select Barcelona as the wasted city, and choose "Little Boy" as the bomb. You can see the effects of the bomb that blow up Hiroshima over Barcelona (it had "only" 16 kt of TNT). This is the typical fission bomb. We can go much further; we can obliterate, not only the city of Barcelona, but everything near it. To do so choose Barcelona again and "W-59 Minuteman I". This is the typical fusion bomb (in fact it is not much of a challenge for a weapon of its kind, that is, just 1 mt of TNT). See the difference among them? Now imagine having, not a mere W-59, but the fearsome 100 mt Zar Bomba.
Notice that this simulator does not has fallout effects into account so, real destruction would be even bigger.
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