Have you ever wondered what would happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in your city?

With Google's Mapplet framework and a bit of Javascript, you can see the outcome.

And it does not look good.

Preparing the Blast

A Mapplet is a convenient map that can be addressed by latitude and longitude, and it supports certain events and methods.

 
For information about this extraordinary technology, this link will take you to the Mapplet site itself.

The following issues had to be resolved for the script:

1) There is no primitive for plotting circles in the Mapplet API. Using sines and cosines of angles to plot a circle is the solution to this.

2) Formulas for estimating the destructive power of a nuclear explosion are available in Wikipedia, the Federation of American Scientists, and other websites.

3) The radius of damage -calculated with the formulas above- have to be converted to degrees of latitude and longitude before plotting in the map. Because the Earth is not a perfect sphere, they will have a slightly elliptical shape on higher latitudes, like in Moscow.

Bombs Away

Using the Mapplet is simple: just select a city and a suitable bomb, and hit the button.

This example shows that much of central London would be vaporized by a small nuclear bomb.

You can click on the "Ground Zero" marker after the explosion, and read about the consequences for those that were inside the areas affected by the explosion.

 
The areas of destruction are for heat effects only.

I thought about including the effects of the shockwave and obviously, the radiation, but I decided to keep the interface simple.

It is also easier to visualize heat burns, as most people have an idea of the pain and suffering that the victims of third-degree burns have to endure.

Using the Code

Due to the architecture of Google Mapplets, the Mapplet cannot be published in an iframe within this page.

You have lo load the Mapplet into your own Google Maps profile.

If you are already logged in to Google, you may click on this link to load the Mapplet into your Google Maps dashboard

You can also click here to see the XML code of the Mapplet.

This script is also available as a Map API application, running off your browser. Click here to go to the Map API version.