Here's What A Nuclear Bomb Would Do To Your City

BELLEVUE, WA - With the unfortunate nuclear false-alarm in Hawaii still fresh in our minds, aren't you a little curious to see what would happen if a real nuclear weapon did strike the U.S.? A professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology has created a pretty scary tool that shows you the blast radius and an estimate of deaths in the event of an attack.

For a demonstration, we used the tool to look at what a nuke would do if it landed in downtown Bellevue. According to professor Alex Wellerstein's "Nuke Map," a 150 kiloton nuke - about the size most recently tested by North Korea - would kill about 56,000 people and leave 175,000 people injured.

The area in a 1,500-foot radius around the impact site would be incinerated by a fireball, while anyone within a 3-1/2 mile radius would suffer third-degree thermal radiation burns. The thermal radius includes residents of Mercer Island, Kirkland, Redmond, and Medina. And that doesn't include nuclear fallout, which would affect a significantly larger area.

Find out what a nuclear bomb would do to your city here

But take the "Nuke Map" with a grain of salt because it's just a model. And take heart that nuclear confrontation with a country like North Korea is extremely, highly unlikely.

Image courtesy Google Maps