Interesting mashup project here, showing the radii of death and damage from a variety of weapons (and even asteroid impacts). Using Google maps, you can see the effect on any location in the world. A few years ago I saw a similarly haunting map of London at The Imperial War Museum. It has really stuck with me, so I wanted to pass this on.

Shown above is the 50 megaton “Tsar Bomba” – the largest explosion ever – detonated over San Diego. The inner region is “conflagration”: everyone is dead within 24 hours. Radiating out from there are regions of 3rd, 2nd, and then 1st degree burns.

Quoting the BldgBlog post:

Nuclear weapons present us with a kind of demonic skeleton key, capable of catastrophically unlocking any city in the world, no matter how dense or well-fortified, in mere seconds.
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The overwhelming obliterative power of nuclear weapons turns them into a kind of ubiquitous anti-landscape, something that no geography, built or natural, can successfully resist.
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If we’re going to study cities, in other words, then we should also study that which is radically anti-city.

Ground Zero (Carlos Labs)