BlastSimulator is a simulation for illustration. All values are approximations; weather, terrain, buildings, time of day and warning time change the real-world consequences considerably.

Maps and place data

• Map tiles, satellite imagery and buildings: © MapTiler · © OpenStreetMap contributors (Open Database License)
• Place search: Natural Earth, public domain
• Map rendering: MapLibre GL JS, BSD-3 licence
• Typeface: Geist and Geist Mono (Vercel), SIL Open Font License 1.1. Fonts and the map library are served from this site; no data is sent to Google or third-party CDNs.

Population

• Schiavina, M.; Freire, S.; Carioli, A.; MacManus, K. (2023): GHS-POP R2023A – GHS population grid multitemporal (1975–2030). European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC). doi:10.2905/2FF68A52-5B5B-4A22-8F40-C41DA8332CFE. Used: epoch 2025, 30 arc-second grid (≈ 1 km). © European Union; reuse is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.
• Methodology: Pesaresi, M. et al. (2024): Advances on the Global Human Settlement Layer by Joint Assessment of Earth Observation and Population Survey Data. International Journal of Digital Earth 17(1). doi:10.1080/17538947.2024.2390454
• The data counts residential population (where people live), not where they are during the day.

Effects model

• Nuclear weapons: scaling laws after Glasstone, S.; Dolan, P. J. (1977): The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd edition. U.S. Department of Defense / Energy Research and Development Administration. Radii for fireball, blast (20, 5 and 1 psi), thermal radiation (3rd-degree burns) and initial radiation (500 rem) as approximation formulas.
• Conventional explosions: TNT blast scaling following the curves of Kingery, C. N.; Bulmash, G. (1984), U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, surface burst. Fireball from a common empirical approximation.
• Shock arrival times, mushroom cloud size and damage visuals: simplified approximations of our own for display purposes.

Casualty estimate

• Share of deaths and injuries per overpressure band after U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment (1979): The Effects of Nuclear War.
• Conventional explosions: lower rates because of the much shorter blast pulse, calibrated to the 2020 Beirut explosion.
• Upper estimate: our own addition of thermal and initial radiation (nuclear) or fireball and flying glass (conventional). Fallout and firestorms are not included.

Weapon yields

• General: publicly available figures; where estimates differ, the commonly cited value is used and the range is given in the description.
• Trinity (24.8 kt): Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2021 reassessment
• Tsar Bomba, Sundial, Gnomon: Wellerstein, A. (2021), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
• R-36M2 (SS-18): Federation of American Scientists
• Smiling Buddha: Atomic Archive
• North Korea 2017: 38 North estimate (≈ 250 kt); other estimates 50–300 kt
• Beirut 2020: Pilger et al. (2021), Scientific Reports; Goldstein (2020), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Rigby et al. (2020), Shock Waves
• MOAB, ATBIP, Tianjin, Halifax, Heligoland, Minor Scale: US Department of Defense figures and common overviews of the largest non-nuclear explosions; the ATBIP figure is a Russian claim and has not been independently confirmed.
• Fictional weapons: figures from the respective work; where the work gives no number, a plausible value is used.