Type your city into the box below, and see what the “Fat Man” or “Little Boy” bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would have done to your neighborhood:

This is a Google Mapplet created by CarlosLabs that’ll display the blast radius of several different sizes of nuclear weapon. It’s an eye-opening look at man’s self-destructive potential. For an even more shocking look, check what the Soviet 50 megaton “Tsar Bomba” would have done to your town. Where I live, a 50MT blast like that would completely immolate all of south Pinellas county. Even the modern B61 bomb (of which approximately 2,000 warheads still exist in the US alone) would be utterly devastating.

Such a short, intense research project, studying microscoping atomic reactions resulted in creations that instantly changed the world forever. That a tiny chain reaction set off above New York City could instantly undo hundreds of years of development, architecture, creativity, and infrastructure, as well as render its surroundings uninhabitable for further centuries, is absolutely mind-boggling.

Read this book for a fascinating look inside the creation of nuclear weaponry.