07 May 2024 , 21:40
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A shocking map has shown the devastating impact a nuclear attack could have across the UK - with millions dead, third-degree burns and cities completely destroyed
A horrifying map has revealed what areas in the UK are likely to be targeted by Russia if the country was to launch a nuclear attack.
The alarming data, provided by Nukemap and its sister site Missilemap, has shown that a major UK city would be one of the first to be wiped out. Just one of Vladmir Putin’s Topol (SS-25) weapons could kill nearly one million people and injure 2.2million more if it was dropped on London. However the destruction would also hit other cities including Birmingham and Nottingham.
The online map tool, built by historian Alex Wellerstein, who is based at Stevens Institute of Technology, shows the disturbing reality of what harm Putin could actually cause. According to the data, the blast range of the 800kt bomb would bury the whole of London, with its effects being felt from Enfield in the north right down to Croydon in the south.
The map shows how the UK would be affected by a nuclear attack ( Image: nuclearsecrecy.com)
It has been reported that the bomb, Tsar Bomba, which is the biggest nuclear weapon to ever be created, would entirely wreck an area 6km across if it was released above Birmingham. As well as claiming 2.4million lives, the explosion would leave people as far away as Leicester, Nottingham and Stoke-on-Trent with third degree burns. If the same bomb was dropped on London, it could kill 5.7million and injure a further 3.4million. A far smaller, 50 mega-tonne Tsar Bomb - the biggest the Soviet Union ever tested - could kill 2.1million people and injure a further 2.1million.
The blast radius would be so big, tens of thousands of people in Liverpool and Leeds would be badly burned and disabled. The only two times nuclear weapons have been dropped on inhabited areas was in 1945, when the US detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As many as 226,000 people were killed in the atrocity, including many thousands of innocent women and children. ICANW points out that the impact of nuclear weapons would be felt long after the initial explosion. "Nuclear weapons produce ionizing radiation, which kills or sickens those exposed, contaminates the environment, and has long-term health consequences, including cancer and genetic damage," the charity warns.
"Less than one percent of the nuclear weapons in the world could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine. "The thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia could bring about a nuclear winter, destroying the essential ecosystems on which all life depends." Those who argue for stockpiling nuclear weapons say that they have led to decades of relative peace by forcing nuclear superpowers into a kind of deadlock under the fear of mutually, assured destruction.