Missile commander simulator3/2/2023 ![]() ![]() While some of the work was straightforward, some equations required complex translation to the digital environment. Next, Wellerstein programmed the calculations into JavaScript to run and graphically depict each simulation. "Those Cold War calculations were daunting for the computing machines of the 1960s, but now easily run in a modern web browser," he explains. When he discovered their existence, Wellerstein dove into defense archives and obtained painstaking blast-zone research derived from postwar studies of detonations at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Nevada Test Site and in the Marshall Islands. government decades ago, then later declassified as open data. While Wellerstein integrated the data and created the visualizations for the two tools, he didn't need to create the math from scratch. "But you can plug some fairly conservative numbers into MISSILEMAP and see that hitting Guam accurately would be somewhat difficult, but not impossible, while hitting Los Angeles is easy - if they have the range."Ī North Korean missile aimed at San Francisco, for instane, could potentially kill or injure at least a quarter-million residents and obliterate much of the city's downtown district according to the MISSILEMAP and NUKEMAP simulations. With regard to a nation like North Korea, "we still don’t know exactly what North Korea’s missiles are capable of," Wellerstein explains. ![]() Users select launch sites, missiles and targets and the accuracy of each missile, the explosive power of its warhead and the odds of hitting its target are instantly calculated and displayed. "But when you pair that with an illustration of a cloud spreading over a city they live in, along with a qualitative description of the effects and casualties, the picture suddenly becomes much clearer."Ī companion tool, MISSILEMAP, does much the same for long-range missiles. "Being told a certain nuclear weapon emits 500 rem of radiation over a given radius means little to the average person," explains Wellerstein. He says web traffic to the site increased ten-fold during the initial phases of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to as many as 150,000 visits daily, likely due to public concerns about international nuclear war. A North Korean missile aimed at San Francisco could potentially kill or injure at least a quarter-million residents and obliterate the city's downtown district, according to Stevens professor Alex Wellerstein's MISSILEMAP and NUKEMAP simulations ![]() Users can experiment with a wide range of nuclear weapons, from small "backpack bombs" to large-scale thermonuclear weapons such as a hydrogen bomb, and more than 220 million "detonations" have been simulated since Wellerstein unveiled it a decade ago. At the click of a "detonate" button, the software produces simulations and visualizations of blast zones, mushroom clouds and fallout plumes spreading through the air - plus fatality and injury estimates - atop digitally mapped renderings of cities. The NUKEMAP tool he created, which works in any web browser, can graphically simulate a nuclear detonation anywhere on the planet. Wellerstein created and manages two software simulation tools that test scenarios and depict the terrible power and potential of the world's vast nuclear and non-nuclear arsenals. Stevens professor and historian of science Alex Wellerstein can take a pretty good guess, thanks to public data collected by the Department of Defense that had largely remained unexplored until Wellerstein discovered and began parsing it for educational purposes. Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine has rekindled public curiosity about long-range nuclear weapons and shorter-range, non-nuclear missile arsenals.Īre Russian, Chinese or North Korean missiles truly accurate enough to target and strike American cities? And what kind of damage would a nuclear detonation or conventional missile wreak on New York, Los Angeles, Washington or Kyiv if it struck home? Stevens Professor Alex Wellerstein ![]()
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