A Map Animation of the Atomic Age

Via Boing Boing and The New Yorker, a map animation that shows every detonation of a nuclear bomb until 1998, by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto:



Says The New Yorker:

It is the sort of set of pictures that makes you want to read—to learn more, for example, about how it came to be that France exploded more than a tenth of those bombs (two hundred and ten); China blew up forty-five. Not that anyone was taking cover in Provence: if you don’t watch the icons above and below the map, you might think that Algeria, and not France, was the world’s fourth nuclear-armed power (and that Australia, not Britain, was the third). The Gerboise Bleue explosion, of a seventy-kiloton device, took place in 1960, in the Sahara desert, in the midst of the Algerian war; several others followed. (Later, after Algeria gained its independence, France’s tests moved to French Polynesia; its last one was in 1996.)

It's a wonder Nevada's even still habitable - though I guess you could make an argument that it's not, really...

Nuclear Armageddon and You

Well, here's a useful tool!



It's a Google Maps Mashup that lets you see the damage radius of nuclear strikes on given locations. It also lets you select by size of weapon - from Hiroshima's "Little Boy" to the 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba" of lore, the most powerful nuke ever detonated.

Yrs. truly would be a sure goner if anything above about 100 kilotons made a direct hit on my local downtown. That's actually a little better than I would have expected to do - I'm not far from downtown, and I would have thought any sort of nuclear direct hit would vaporize me instantly. It makes me wonder, actually, if the post-War move towards suburbanization in the U.S. was actually motivated by nuclear fear to a greater degree than I'd realized. I had sort of assumed that if you lived in a major metro area, any sort of large-scale nuclear war would do you in. But this makes it look like even your inner-ring suburbanites would have at least a fighting chance - especially if they'd made prudent investments in those backyard bomb shelters that were all the rage back then.

Here's a Wired write-up of the "mapplet."