Something To Keep You Up At Night

Thanks to the wonders of modern nuclear physicists and Google Maps, HYDESim provides us with the opportunity to simulate the destruction zone of a nuclear bomb explosion.

As if New Yorkers didn't have enough to be paranoid about.

Before I dashed underneath my sheets and began whimpering like a maimed puppy dog, I had enough energy to simulate the destruction radius of a 50 kiloton bomb detonating in Times Square. For those keeping track, our ancient Hiroshima nuke was 22 kilotons. By default, the website loads a 100 KT bomb, with a central blast located somewhere in mid-SoHo. I thought 50 KT was a reasonable modern-day, modern-made bomb.

Call me curious. Call me stupid. Call me masochistic.

The bad news is that most of the New York City we know and love (namely Manhattan) would suffer immediate and complete destruction. Even if many of the large buildings absorbed fractions of the blast, all of Midtown and almost all of Downtown and Uptown would suffer moderate to severe damage. Even Hoboken would feel the effects. The good news is that I would probably die so quickly that my brain couldn't process what was happening.

And thanks to a 2002 New York Times Magazine article by now-executive editor Bill Keller (p.22), I know that even if the pressure of the blast didn't kill me and destroy my home, anyone exposed to the quarter-mile fireball "would die a gruesome death from radiation sickness within a day -- anyone, that is, who survived the third-degree burns." So I've got that going for me, which is nice. But get this: Keller's hypothetical explosion only discusses a one-kiloton explosion! The wimp!

Granted, the likelihood of any of scenarios coming to fruition is quite slim. But I still can't help but feel a knot in the pit of my stomach when I hear the deep rumble of a subway passing under the street at night, and I wonder if that's just the noise of successive buildings collapsing, getting nearer, and nearer, and nearer...

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My prediction is that I will continue to grow up within a peer group who remain perpetually in an elevated state of alert. Historians will begin to refer to us as the Code Orange Generation. We were a generation of kids who didn't have the historic significance of our parents. We didn't have moon landings or Woodstocks. We didn't have Kennedy assassinations or Vietnams or Koreas. Until September 11th, 2001, we were a complacent, sheltered generation who watched a televised war the way we watched a Spielberg or Coppola movie, only with less emotional connection. We didn't have a massively significant event to call our historical milestone. We lacked definition.

19 men with 4 airplanes changed that in a matter of minutes.

Now sociologists will have something to write about. We are the first group of modern voters whose first presidential vote could have hinged solely on the need to feel safe at home. This is a veritable party of Linuses who just need their security blanket. These are children who allow this search for safety to trump all other beliefs, even if that means voting for the other party's candidate. But just looking at 2004 or 2008 is too myopic to be conclusive. Only time will tell.

Ultimately, the source of our fear can be summed up quite well by the cover of that NYT Magazine from 2002: The worst reason why we won't suffer a nuclear attack in a major U.S. city is because it hasn't happened yet.

Scared yet? Shouldn't we be?