I used to wonder how big is the radius of atomic explosion would really be, if it were to be detonated over my home city. Take for e.g., the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of World-War-II, if it were to be detonated with the Petronas Twin Tower as the epicenter, how far would the heat wave reach ? The answer is, people living in as far as the Lake Garden, Sentul, Desa Pandan, Taman Maluri, etc, would suffer 1st degree burn! And that’s with that 1 atomic bomb from more than 60 years ago! Imagine what would happen with the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated (for testing) – the Tsar Bomba (equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT). With just one of that piece of hell, all of the Selangor State with part of Negeri Sembilan and Pahang state, from Tanjong Malim, all the way down to one of Malaysia’s beach destination, Port-Dickson (90km from Kuala Lumpur) and beyond Bentong to the east will be affected, with whole of Klang Valley totally decimated! That could be, what, more than 5 millions people?!

Check it out from this new website called Ground Zero. Here, you can simulate how a nuclear blast would affect any place in the world.

1. Just key in the name of the place you would like to nuke, click Search to go to that place.

2. Next, select your weapon of choice and click ‘Nuke it’ to see the instant action!

Below are the meanings of the radius’s colors, with ‘1st degree burns’ means minor skin burn, and ‘Conflagration’ means you’re fatally screwed up with Great Ball of Fire all around you and inside of you.

You may have noticed that you can actually choose ‘Asteroid Impact’ as your weapon. I see this as just a ‘fun’ option, because the radius of damage would need to depend on the size of the asteroid, and no one is quite certain of its impact so far. Looking at the result it produces (where the whole continents are affected), it looks like it’s using the highest Torino Scale of 10 ? If we’re not killed by the initial impact’s blast, we will still be killed by the subsequent dust, debris, poisonous rain, draught, hunger, tsunami, volcanoes, etc; generally the end of civilizations as we know it.

Holy Cow!