Your illustrations are great but I’m thinking that there might be more to this than just some simple calculations…

Think about the damage and cost inflicted by the 9/11 attacks. The total area destroyed was relatively tiny, but the consequences for the world were profound.

Or think about the ‘crisis’ caused by electricity blackouts, or internet failures that happen from time to time and destroy no real estate.

Do you really think that life in the UK, for example, would continue in any meaningful sense if every City was partially destroyed by even a small nuke each? No electricity, almost no communications, no water or sewage, no news, almost no surviving doctors, few deliveries of imported or domestic food, radiation pollution, vast numbers of injured people, barely any law and order….

Your other visualisations are great but this one needs to go back to the drawing board.

Like you, I grew up under the ‘nuclear cloud’, so I am interested to see you do it again with more sophisticated thinking, that captures the impact of a nuke on the complex systems that sustain our cities.

It used a nuclear weapon yield of 50 megatons. This is equivalent to 1,400 times the combined power of the two nuclear explosives used in World War II; Little Boy (13-18 kilotons) and Fat Man (21 kilotons), the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In fact, when the soviet union decided to test it, they only used HALF of it’s explosive capabilities for fear that using it at maximum capacity would result in radioactive fallout.
The initial three-stage design was capable of approximately 100 Mt, but would have caused too much radioactive fallout. To limit fallout, the third stage and possibly the second stage had a lead tamper instead of a uranium-238 fusion tamper (which greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction). This eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons, so that approximately 97% of the total energy resulted from fusion alone.
Even after deactivating it’s fullest potential, it was still the most powerful bomb in the world.
And the effect was felt from around the world.
Here’s a video on youtube I just found with all of the fact in the video description.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxD44HO8dNQ

I just have to ask, tho… what about fallout and nuclear winter?

Or is nuclear winter just counterbalanced by climate change? (ha ha).

Next time, try factoring in Brad and Angelina, Mr. Smartypants graph maker!

And most of our(American) thermonuclear(the big/modern kinds of nukes) testing was done in the south pacific.

The fatal flaw in this article is that it only considers the “total destruction” radius of modern nuclear weapons. However, the real killer – and the thing that would devastate and possible wipe out modern civilization – is not the blast wave of such a bomb, or even the radioactive fallout. What would be most devastating is the amount of dust and debris kicked up into the atmosphere by a significant number of nuclear explosions. That dust would quickly be spread through the upper atmosphere and would block a tremendous amount of sunlight, thus cooling the earth.

As an example, in 1816 (”the year without a summer” as some historians call it) the earth experienced a larger than average rate of volcanic eruptions. The ash ejected into the atmosphere from these volcanic eruptions was enough to cause famine on a nigh global scale. Throughout much of Europe and North America, the summer growing season was virtually non-existent. Snow fell well into the summer months. The death toll from the lack of food was enormous. And that was just the result of a few extra major volcanic eruptions. A large scale nuclear war would kick up many many times that amount of ash. The “nuclear winter” is what would destroy human civilization, not the blasts or radiation from the bombs. Even if it were to last only 2 years, in that time it is likely that the vast majority of every large land animal population – including humans – would die of starvation.

We like to think that we are above nature; that we are invincible masters of the Earth. But the reality of it is, we are still merely a part of the intricate web that props up all life on this planet. The difference is, for the first time in the history of life, a species has the ability to put holes in that web large enough to cause its collapse. What remains questionable is whether or not we are smart enough to have that ability, and yet wise enough to avoid destroying not only our one and only home, but so far as we know the only bastion of life in the entire universe.