New app lets you drop the (virtual) bomb on Boston
How much damage could Kim Jong-un do to Boston if unleashed North Korea’s arsenal on the Bay State? What about if, like depicted in Olympus Has Fallen, the United States’ atomic arsenal was turned again itself?
A new app lets find out, in an evocative mashup of Google Earth that puts looming mushroom clouds over Boston’s (or any other city’s) blocky skline.
To use it, you just need to install the free Google Earth plug in and head to NukeMap3D.
From there, you can set the size and target of the bomb, as well as your vantage point, and drop away.
The site the interactive is hosted on, Nuclear Secrecy, is run by Alex Wellerstein, a Harvard Ph.D. now living in Washington, D.C.
“Learning how to speak to people interested in policy about the uses of history without doing a lot of damage to the quality of the historical narrative (i.e. making it too simple or reductionist) has been a long-term project of mine as well,’’ he writes, explaining the project.
For the record, dropping “Ivy Mike,’’ the first hydrogen bomb, on Harvard’s ivory towers would kill an estimated 1.5 million people. To see how much damage Kim would do, try the website yourself.
Update: It looks like the site’s servers are nuked — er, overwhelmed by traffic at the moment.
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