The “Google Maps” which reveals what the impact of a nuclear bomb would be if it were dropped on Madrid

The recent escalation of the war between Ukraine and Russia, based on the latest long-range attacks carried out by the two powers, has Spain and the whole world in suspense. And this is not due to lack of weapons; the British Storm Shadow missiles, the Kinzhal hypersonic missiles that Russia used to respond or the ATACMS are just a few examples. Putin, in fact, It has already updated its nuclear doctrine to threaten the Western bloc.

Already at the beginning of the war, Russia put on the table an unexpected nuclear threat this marked red lines from Ukraine’s allies. Fear of a sudden nuclear attack from Putin has led many to wonder what would happen if a nuclear bomb fell on the nerve center of Spain, one of Zelensky’s allied countries.

There is a way to find out. We are talking about this website to simulate the impacts of a nuclear bombrun by the Outrider Foundation, which seeks to graphically show the impact a large nuclear detonation would have anywhere on the map. We used it to simulate what would happen if Russia followed through on its threats against Madrid.

A nuclear bomb simulator

Outrider Foundation is a journalistic association with several projects to its credit, and one of the most interesting is the nuclear bomb explosion simulator, whose name leaves nothing to the imagination. From a completely modernized perspective, this site places on a map all the harmful effects of launching a nuclear bomb in a certain position.

The simulator not only offers a wide range of bombs, but also offers options to choose the exact conditions of the explosion, providing data and estimated figures on deaths, injuries, etc. Just choose the site, and the site will “drop” the bomb with an animation that includes the epicenter, the shock wave, the heatwave and the resulting fireball.

Of course, it all depends on the parameters of the site itself, the chosen pump, etc. It should be noted that the figures are not entirely reliable; They change from impact to impact, and in some cases they seem quite oversized. For example, in this animation we used the standard “Low Yield Nuke”, which is equivalent to a short-range tactical nuclear weapon. 148,883 injured, 65,939 dead and a write-off of 5.64 square kilometers.

However, we will use the most powerful bomb Russia has: the Tsar Bomba or Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever used and the only one of Russian origin available in the simulator. Not only does this cover practically the entire community, but the results are terrible: more than 3.4 million dead, 1.2 million injured, a radiation area of ​​80 square kilometers and a shock wave of 893.65 square kilometers.

In total, it is possible to choose between four nuclear weapons: the nuclear weapons already mentioned Low yield nuclear equivalent to the child used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the North Korean H-bomb (a nuclear-powered ballistic missile from North Korea), the W-87 (a weaponized nuclear warhead from the United States) and the deadly Tzar bomb, which, among other things, is responsible for the most devastating nuclear explosion ever made by man.

Other settings include choosing whether the bomb detonates in the air or on the surface, and basically any location on the map. Obviously, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Russia could drop such a bomb on the center of Madrid, but it is certain that the escalation between Putin and Zelensky leaves a scene of very serious tension.