The targets of a 1956 US nuclear war plan, mapped in NUKEMAP (in its new high-contrast mode), with yesterday’s weather data used to guide the fallout plumes. Over 1,100 targets. For the sake of the “simulation,” I used a 1.2 Mt weapon for each detonation (in reality, the yields varied a lot, and targets likely had multiple weapons targeted on them). For surface bursts (which would generate fallout), if this happened today the prompt casualties would be (according to NUKEMAP’s casualty estimations) some 78 million fatalities and 128 million injuries. For airbursts optimized for “soft” targets (like cities), it would be 125 million fatalities, 244 million injuries (but little fallout).
How I did this: I scraped the data from the Future of Life Institute’s page about the target list, which itself was taken from the list that the National Security Archive got declassified. I then made a few small modifications to the NUKEMAP that allowed it to accept generated lists of huge numbers of targets in this way. I wrote a separate script to grab the weather data from openweathermap.org and then another that would calculate the casualties in a way that wouldn’t overload the casualty database. This is just a back-of-the-envelope model. If you are interested in crashing your browser by loading this into it (it takes about 1.5 GB of RAM to load all of the detonations into Google Maps!), click here.
