The New Nuclear Arms Race

As several countries actively expand their arsenals of nuclear weapons, Sweden's SVT has released an investigation into World Nuclear Forces. In recent years, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea have all augmented their nuclear stockpiles. 

In World Nuclear Forces SVT examines the numbers of nuclear weapons owned by countries around the world and the overall and country trends in nuclear weapon numbers over time. SVT's article also includes an interactive map based nuclear weapons 'simulator'. This simulator allows you to select from a menu of actual nuclear weapons and to simulate the effect it would have if dropped on a location of your choice.

As you can see from the screenshot above, showing the effect of a 5,000 kiloton Chinese Landbased ballistic missile dropped on San Francisco, the simulator visualizes the extent of the fireball, radiation, pressure wave and extreme heat zones on a location using concentric colored circles (San Francisco could be in range of a 5,000 kiloton Chinese Landbased missile stationed on China's eastern seaboard).

There are of course other options open to those interested in simulating nuclear Armageddon. Since 2012 Alex Wellerstein's NUKEMAP has been visualizing the effects of different sized nuclear weapons on locations around the globe.

NUKEMAP allows you to explore the fireball, airblast and radiation fallout extents of different nuclear weapons on any location in the world. Alex's map can also calculate the estimated number of casualties of a nuclear weapon dropped at any location. This estimation includes the expected number of fatalities and the expected number of injuries.