Top all-time · #350
Alex Wellerstein
Personal blog · nuclearsecrecy.comhistoryscience
Alex Wellerstein writes Restricted Data: A Nuclear History Blog, a personal blog at nuclearsecrecy.com about history and science. Since 2012, 150 different Hacker News readers have linked it 179 times, most often “Nuke Map: Interactive Nuclear Bomb Map”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for NUKEMAP, its interactive nuclear-blast effects map, which commenters use to model yields and cite in discussions.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- The NUKEMAP blast-effects tool is called fun, good in its visualizations, and worth playing with.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Restricted Data is a blog about nuclear secrecy, past and present, run by Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science.
Most-linked posts?
- Nuke Map: Interactive Nuclear Bomb Map62 people · 72 mentions · first linked 2017-03-13
- NukeMap – Drop a nuke on a map33 people · 34 mentions · first linked 2012-02-22
- Nuclear detonation visualizer6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-12-08
- Forbidden spheres4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-01-03
- NUKEMAP 3D nuclear weapons effects calculator4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-07-25
- Nuclear Effects Calculator2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-02-23
- NUKEMAP – Map the impact of nuclear bombs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-05
- /nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&lng=-92.2895948&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&ff=50&zm=72 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-30
- Interactive MissileMap2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-07
What Hacker News says?
Check out the Nuclear Effects Calculator; You can see what effect various historical bombs would have. (They include Tsar Bomba.) ( http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/2012/02/03/presenting-nukemap... ) ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624714 )
Comment linking /blog/2012/02/03/presenting-nukemap/
on “How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill”Submitted Missilemap as a story · 190 points
HN discussionNukemap has settings for airburst height (under "advanced options"): https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ For a 10mt explosion at 20km height it shows a third degree burn radius of 27km. Chelyabinsk was ~0.5kt at 29km. Larger objects are expected to penetrate further into the atmosphere before exploding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_air_burst I'm not sure how much time you'd have to evaluate size or distance,…
Comment linking /nukemap/
on “Ocean drone captures video from inside a hurricane”Submitted Nuke Map: Interactive Nuclear Bomb Map as a story · 160 points
HN discussionThis was a bit more than a hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event I'd say that such an event happening over a populated region of the Earth would be pretty bad. It's worth a bit of investment. Here's what would happen if Tunguska happened over Paris, using a mid-range estimate of its magnitude: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&ln...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&lng=2.2945&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=31834&casualties=1&psi=20,5,1&zm=2
on “Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission”Submitted Nukemap as a story · 156 points
HN discussionAt least 3, in at least 3 seperate datacenters. According to https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ - it'd take at least a 1 megaton warhead to take out two of the ap-southeast-2 datacenters, and over 10MT to take out 3. I suspect you'd need a lot less than that though, the 1MT warhead would probably take out enough outside-the-datacenter infrastructure to take the entire AZ offline. I don't care too much though, if so…
Comment linking /nukemap/
on “S3 is files, but not a filesystem”Submitted Nuclear Effects Calculator as a story · 94 points
HN discussionhttps://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=8000&lat=40.72422&ln...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=8000&lat=40.72422&lng=-73.99611&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&casualties=1&psi=20,5,1&zm=10
on “Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy”Submitted Nukemap as a story · 76 points
HN discussion3.8m for NYC , 3.1m for Tokyo https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=8000&lat=40.72422&ln... https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=8000&lat=35.6889853&...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=8000&lat=35.6889853&lng=139.6929116&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&crater=1&casualties=1&psi=20,5,1&zm=10
on “Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy”Submitted Rare Photos of the Soviet Bomb Project as a story · 74 points
HN discussionI assume this is just a word-for-word translation for "зона полного разрушения". If you "detonate" 100M Tzar Bomb on https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ it tells you that >Moderate blast damage radius (5 psi): 32.6 km So I assume that the “ring of absolute destruction” ~= "Moderate blast damage radius"
Comment linking /nukemap/
on “Rosatom releases previously classified documentary video of Tsar Bomba nuke test”Submitted Nukemap Is Down as a story · 24 points
HN discussionUsing the nukemap, with a target of Faro: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=4000&lat=35.5111142&l...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=4000&lat=35.5111142&lng=-77.8447581&hob_ft=0&ff=55&zm=10
on “Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed”Submitted Interactive MissileMap as a story · 20 points
HN discussion> > equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion To be clear, this didn't happen. No one said it did. There was a chance something like this could have happened (the Chernobyl miniseries does a great job of showing this). The issue was that there were large water tanks under the reactor, and that the reactor material would eventually melt into those tanks, superheat the water and cause an enormous steam explosion, further sc…
on “Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone”Submitted Nuke Map as a story · 7 points
HN discussionOr you could just play with: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Comment linking /nukemap/
on “Militarized Dolphins Protect Almost a Quarter of the US Nuclear Stockpile”Submitted Nukemap – Atomic Bomb Simulator as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThere's also multiple things that all have to function for a nuke to function. I don't want to under-state how bad even a 10% chance of these working is, but I think there's a only a 10% chance of any given nuke reaching its target and exploding as intended. Some of that's correlated and applies to all the nukes, some of it isn't. Just for the sake of examples as I don't have any real insight, consider a tritium-boo…
Comment linking /nukemap/
on “Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in drone attack deep in Russia”Submitted Canari in the coal mine – Nuke map is currently down as a story · 5 points
HN discussion>Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs. The USSRs guidance computers were quite bad, and reentry would have scattered multiple paylo…
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=29.7589&lng=-95.3677&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=47553&ff=52&psi=20,5,1&zm=9
on “Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy”Submitted Nuclear detonation visualizer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThat's a modern bomb, in the 50s and early 60s, when Hobby Airport (the one in the southeast of downtown) was considered to be in the boonies, the nuclear threat looked like this: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=20&lat=29.7589&lng=-...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=20&lat=29.7589&lng=-95.3677&hob_opt=2&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=1650&psi=20,5,1&zm=13
on “Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy”Submitted NukeMap – Drop a nuke on a map as a story · 4 points
HN discussion9MT W53 (Titan II warhead): Fireball covers downtown Houston, moderate damage out to the borders of Houston proper, 50% chance of 3rd degree burns as far as Sugar Land or Humble. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=29.7500709&...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=29.7500709&lng=-95.3681946&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=21310&ff=50&therm=_3rd-50&zm=10
on “Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy”Submitted NUKEMAP 3D nuclear weapons effects calculator as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLet's take a look at Houston on a Nuke Map: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=29.7589&lng...
Comment linking /nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=29.7589&lng=-95.3677&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=17519&ff=50&psi=20,5,1&zm=10
on “Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy”Submitted Nukemap: Select Target and Yield as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
