On the topic of firey death, use this fun toy to learn how fuck you are!
For me, if a nuke hit my nearest big city i am in the "50% chance of 1st degree burn" zone! so, depending on the wind, i'm only minorly fucked!
Oh that's interesting. Apparently, I'll be OK in the case of Nuclear Terrorism, at least, since no one is going to hit residential areas like mine over the world trade center or something.
It also looks like bombs produced by the likes of India and Pakistan aren't enough to reach from Lower Manhattan to where I live, although given the city involved I shudder to imagine the consequences of "most residential buildings collapse" on lower manhattan. It seems like at a minimum, the largest Nuclear device detonated by the French is necessary to inflict injuries on me.
Although looking at the "Ivy Mike", the first ever H-bomb tested, gives you a real feel for how the H-Bomb completely invalidated the concerns the military had about ICBMs being inaccurate at long-range, because their yield was so great it didn't matter whether you hit the city or the suburb. The Thermal Radiation from that could reach me at college, nevermind when I'm at home! You could miss entirely and hit Staten Island and the entire city would still suffer burns. And the sight of "At 20 psi overpressure, heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished; fatalities approach 100%." over most of Manhattan is worrying.
Oh hey it was a checker for wind effects on fallout, the number of hospitals and fireplaces struck, a calculator of the size of the crater, and even a casualty calculator. This has reminded me that the fallout from a terrorist attack would affect me because of the wind. Fuckies.
Casualty counter for a terrorist attack (ignoring fallout):
Estimated fatalities:
103,000
Estimated injuries:
213,430
Let's try the French weapon now.
Estimated fatalities:
1,039,840
Estimated injuries:
2,024,010
How about China's current ICBMs?
Estimated fatalities:
3,245,840
Estimated injuries:
4,654,300
I'm almost certainly one of those nameless millions. Welll alright, for completeness sake, tell me what happens if the first H-Bomb ever tested was dropped here.
Estimated fatalities:
3,487,240
Estimated injuries:
3,227,170
This is actually lower than the previous, but that count doesn't include the much greater fallout effects. That seems quite relevant because the fallout map is a streak of deadly radiation reaching all the way into Massachusetts, with less deadly "kill you slowly" radiation reaching up into Maine. There are people in Hartford and New Haven being exposed to 1000 rads in an hour, they wouldn't survive this scenario; while Boston is looking at between 10-100 rads depending on where you live.
EDIT: I just spent like 30 minutes nuking every major city I could find in the US with Cuban Missile Crisis Era Soviet Missiles. Out of a hundred missiles, casualties are about 30 million. Disappointing, honestly, but there's not accounting for fallout; that's just the initial deaths. Injuries exceed 53 million.
I live in one of the few sections of the continental US not expected to be hit by significant fallout in the event of global thermonuclear war. :V
I promise you that if I was in charge of direting the Russian Nuclear targets, you would be. I made sure to spread the love.