Social Studies

All of us work best when we can put the content into some form of appropriate context. One of these studies that is hard to understand and difficult to put into context is nuclear warfare.

It's one thing to talk of the horrors of nuclear warfare but quite another when you are able to bring it home and try to understand just how we would be affected should something that catastrophic happen around here. At the WGBH PBS website, there is an interactive page that lets you choose your target, choose your weapon and the drop the bomb and observe the results.

Many people have played Global Thermonuclear Warfare on the computer. It was one of the first "games" or "simulations" available for the Commodore PET computer that I experienced. The only casualties ther were pixels on a computer screen. There was a clear winner and loser and, when you turned the computer off, the problem went away. The "Day After" could be another run of the game.

Suppose you were able to put nuclear warfare into a local perspective? At this website, you can. All that you have to do is set the appropriate parameters and then press the button. The weapons have been upgraded to today's standards but references are made to the bomb dropped at Hiroshima.

Once you've pushed the button, observe the fallout. In this case, I chose to drop the bomb on Windsor, Ontario. The resulting damage is shown below.

From the centre of the blast at the corner of Ouellette Avenue and Tecumseh Road, you can see the impact that this explosion would have. The 12, 5, 2, and 1 refer to the pounds per square inch that such a device would have. You can see that it dissipates with difference but outlying areas such as the towns of Tecumseh and Lasalle still would feel the impact.

In addition to maps generated by the explosion, further explore this website to find more of the realities of a nuclear encounter. The site is very sobering but the authors have done a terrific job of placing context on such a serious subject.