A 10-Year-Old Nuclear-Blast Simulator Is Popular Again
Welcome to Galaxy Brain—a newsletter from Charlie Warzel about technology, media, culture, and big ideas. You can read what this is all about here. If you like what you see, consider forwarding it to a friend or two. We’re still figuring things out in our new home so let me know what you think: galaxybrain@theatlantic.com.
This is a free edition of the newsletter, but you can subscribe to The Atlantic to get access to all posts. Past editions I’m proud of include: Guardians of the Internet, Don’t Alienate the Willing, and How to Spend 432,870 Minutes on Spotify in a Year.
Devoted Galaxy Brain readers might remember a post from my Substack days in which I interviewed Tom Neill, a Londoner who, while bored in lockdown, built a silly website tracking the container ship that was then currently (and rather gloriously) wedged in the Suez Canal. I am generally fascinated by what it’s like when something a person builds is at the center of a viral storm (as Neill’s site was). That interview is still one of my favorite newsletters. Today, I’m continuing the series—though under far more serious circumstances.
The first time I used Nukemap was sometime in 2013, when I was living in New York City. I’m not certain how I stumbled on the site, but I know I spent at least an hour toying with it. Nukemap is a nuclear-effects calculator, which is to say, a website that shows you the various radii of destruction, if a nuclear bomb went off in the given location. You can customize the area of detonation, the size of the bomb, and other details. The site is somewhat of a cult classic, with over 220 million “detonations” logged since it came online in 2012. The results it shows are, as you can imagine, sobering—especially now.
Last week, after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered his nuclear forces into a higher state of alert. It was the Kremlin had done this on that—but the move has brought the notion of nuclear war back into the global conversation in a nontrivial way. As you might expect, Nukemap’s traffic has surged, and the site has, at some points, crashed.
