Grim Online Toys

Peace is a good thing.

In our 1950s youth, we lived 13.7 miles from Offutt Air Force Base, under the flight pattern of bombers coming in for a landing. Given the movies we were shown in school at the time (urging us to "duck and cover") and the Cold War atmosphere, it was hard for a kid not to worry about all the Soviet warheads pointing at Offutt. Childhood consisted of anxiously computing blast radii, fretting over the prevailing wind direction, and counting the containers of water down in our farmhouse basement (which was our family's bomb shelter plan).

All that was guess work . . . now the internet gives us Ground Zero , a little mapplet using Google Maps to compute the blast radii of various nuclear ordinance from any ground zero one wishes to set. Just enter a location, choose a bomb, and then click "Nuke it!"

If one were to drop a "Tsar Bomba" (1961, USSR) on Offutt . . . well, the outcome doesn't look so good for the family farm:

To help keep these things in perspective, however, the mapplet also allows one to compute the impact of an asteroid strike.  It makes all the bombs look puny.