NUKEMAP is a web-based nuclear weapons effects simulator. I created it in 2012 (and did all programming, design, and research on it). Since then it has had many updates to its effects model and capabilities. It has been used by over 20 million people globally, and has been featured in both academic and general-audience publications and television shows for depicting nuclear weapons effects. “The scariest site on the Internet isn’t lurking on the dark web, but hiding in plain sight at nuclearsecrecy.com,” says The Washington Post.
NUKEMAP is essentially a “mash-up” of Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977) and online map programs (initially Google Maps, but now MapBox). It allows a user to simulate a nuclear detonation (with several possible parameters, including explosive yield and height of burst) anywhere on the world. It gives information about the ranges of prompt effects (blast, heat, acute ionizing radiation), delayed effects (fallout contamination), and calculates estimates as to the numbers of possible casualties based on an underlying database of global ambient population density.
NUKEMAP is not the first such website to have been created, but its ease and quickness of use, extensive information, and deeply-developed effects model have led it to become the “gold standard” in such websites. It also features an extensive FAQ that explains the origins of the models, qualifies their accuracy, and in general attempts to set a high bar for technical transparency.
As a result, NUKEMAP has been used by scholars, commentators, and journalists across the political spectrum — a rare case of a 21st century tool about a controversial technology that has allowed people of differing opinions to at least agree on the basic technical dimensions of the problem.
In 2013, I also released a version of NUKEMAP called NUKEMAP 3D, which does the same functions albeit also allowed the rendering of a three-dimensional mushroom cloud in the Google Earth API, allowing an additional visual dimension of the size of these weapons to be more intuitively understood. Unfortunately, Google discontinued support for the necessary API code in 2016, and the code is no longer operable. There is a (somewhat inadequate) work-around (the cloud shapes can be exported to Google Earth Pro, as described in the link above).
In 2014, NUKEMAP was a finalist for a National Science Foundation “Vizzies” Award for Data Visualization.
In 2017, I also developed the MISSILEMAP, a variant of NUKEMAP that visualizes the relationship between nuclear missile range and accuracy and the explosive payload, showing how nuclear planners regard the military utility of these weapons. It allows one, for example, to determine why a nation might aim several weapons at a single target in order to reach a guaranteed confidence in its destruction.
In 2018, I worked with the company BlueCadet to develop a variation of the NUKEMAP with funding from the Outrider Foundation targeted towards younger audiences. Along with generating significant news coverage, it was named as a finalist for the 2018 Science Media Awards at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.