The original NUKEMAP was created in February 2012 by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear weapons. He holds a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, and Wellerstein is finishing a book on the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States from the Manhattan Project through the War on Terror. At the time Wellerstein created the NUKEMAP, he was an Associate Historian at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland. In 2014, Wellerstein began working as an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Note:Wellerstein is a historian of physics, not a physicist ... people seem to sometimes get confused on this because of the subject matter I study and where Wellerstein has worked. You can read more about his research on his blog: Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.
In July 2013, Wellerstein unveiled NUKEMAP2 and NUKEMAP3D. NUKEMAP2 allows for many more effects visualization options, and the display of casualties and fallout information. NUKEMAP3D allows for the visualization of the likely mushroom cloud sizes in a 3D environment. In December 2013, Wellerstein upgraded the blast model of NUKEMAP2 to account for arbitrary-height detonations. In April 2015, Wellerstein performed a major algorithm upgrade to the casualty model to give it much finer-grade calculation of people over small areas and to generally increase its speed of calculation. NUKEMAP3D's development has been put on hold after Google announced its degradation of the Google Earth Plugin API, on which NUKEMAP3D relies.
The original NUKEMAP and NUKEMAP2 are both Google Maps "mashups." This means that they use publicly-available code to modify the way that Google Maps data is displayed (this is the "Google Maps API") along with a custom-built Javascript model to show various nuclear weapons effects. In simpler terms, this means that the NUKEMAP is code that can work with Google Maps technology to show you what happens when a bomb goes off. NUKEMAP2 is essentially the same thing as the original NUKEMAP except the nuclear effects information is based on much more sophisticated coding and models. Information about the models is below.
NUKEMAP3D uses the same models, but uses the Google Earth API to display these in a 3D environment. This allows the visualization of 3D mushroom clouds, for example, by importing cloud models and manipulating them within the browser environment.
All of the coding, design, and adaptation of the old Cold War models to modern Javascript was done by Wellerstein. The population density dataset was graciously purchased for this use by the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, and AIP in general needs to be credited for supporting the NUKEMAP activity.
Why was the NUKEMAP created? We live in a world where nuclear weapons issues are on the front pages of our newspapers on a regular basis, yet most people still have a very bad sense of what an exploding nuclear weapon can actually do. Some people think they destroy everything in the world all that once, some people think they are not very different from conventional bombs. The reality is somewhere in between: nuclear weapons can cause immense destruction and huge losses of life, but the effects are still comprehendible on a human scale.
The NUKEMAP is aimed at helping people visualize nuclear weapons on terms they can make sense of, helping them to get a sense of the scale of the bombs' impacts. By allowing people to use arbitrarily picked geographical locations, I hope that people will come to understand what a nuclear weapon would do to places they are familiar with, and how the different sizes of nuclear weapons change the results.
There are many different political interpretations one can legitimately take away from such results. There is not intended to be a simple political "message" of the NUKEMAP.Who pays for the NUKEMAP?The NUKEMAP's server bills are paid for by the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, my employer. Stevens is very supportive of my modeling and educational work.Could a terrorist, rogue state, or other nuclear power use this for nefarious purposes?Nuclear states have people whose jobs it is to do the kinds of calculations that the NUKEMAP does, but they probably use better models that are more specific to their particular targets and weaponry. The NUKEMAP would not tell such people anything that they didn't know.
As for terrorists: If we get to the point where a terrorist group is asking, "where should I set off my nuclear weapon that I have?" then we've already gone past the point of no return. There's no way to avert a catastrophe at that point. No terrorist is going to be surprised that nuclear weapons do a lot of damage. Similarly, it isn't exactly too hard to figure out what the most attractive targets would be even without such a map (the most populous or politically important areas of a target country). So I don't really consider the NUKEMAP to be giving such people anything new. The reason terrorists don't currently have nuclear weapons (so far as we know) has nothing to do with them not being aware that nuclear weapons are impressive and devastating.
All of the effects models used by the NUKEMAP are unclassified. There is no secret information here. What the NUKEMAP does is make the models easier to visualize. I've had a hard time seeing any harm in that. A nuclear effects calculator is not a nuclear weapon. It seems like an obvious statement, but people seem prone to mixing these up.
Of particular note here is that there is a huge difference between a) military-grade nuclear weapons, b) "dirty bombs", and c) nuclear material used in nuclear power plants (more).
Also see the Missle Map showing the range of various rocket types (here).
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