Although it first appeared in 2015, a detailed explanation about what would happen to Singapore should a nuke detonate is popping up in newsfeeds once again.
The query posted on question-and-answer platform Quora was simple (and morbid) enough: “Would modern day Singapore as a nation cease to exist if a megaton nuclear bomb was detonated over it?”
A man by the name of Visakan Veerasamy who apparently served in the bomb squad for 16 months (i.e. during National Service) gamely answered. Visakan entertainingly provided detailed descriptions of the neighborhoods that would be decimated and who would suffer serious burns or taste the sweet nectar of instant death should a one megaton thermonuclear warhead detonate in the middle of Singapore. Over a million fatalities and over two million injuries, by his count.
But for those who’d love to imagine what’d happen if “Fat Man” exploded in Yishun, for example, let us introduce you to the interactive map that Visakan used to calculate the damage: Nukemap.
Created in 2012 by nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein, this engine combines Google Maps data with his custom-built Javascript model to show various nuclear weapons effects.
“The NUKEMAP is aimed at helping people visualize nuclear weapons on terms they can make sense of — helping them to get a sense of the scale of the bombs,” writes Wellerstein.
“By allowing people to use arbitrarily picked geographical locations, I hope that people will come to understand what a nuclear weapon would do to places they are familiar with, and how the different sizes of nuclear weapons change the results.”
Go ahead and play around with the map to see which districts would get obliterated instantly and which ones would just sustain thermal radiation. Oh, and be sure to try out the Tsar Bomba, the largest USSR bomb ever tested with a yield of 50,000 kilotons (Spoiler alert: Singapore island is pretty much done for). A scary thought indeed, especially since it was created in 1961 — imagine what today’s nukes could do.
