The map above simulates a 300-kiloton nuclear airburst over Houston, USA — roughly the size of a modern deployed warhead. The coloured rings show the estimated fireball, the zones of heavy, moderate and light blast damage, the reach of the thermal flash and the ionizing-radiation dose. Drag the marker or change the weapon in the full simulator to explore other scenarios.
The metropolitan area is home to about 7.1 million people — the rings above are drawn to real scale over their homes.
The marker is on downtown Houston. The 1.9 km zone of total destruction covers the downtown skyscrapers, Minute Maid Park, the Theater District and the George R. Brown Convention Center; the 4.7 km collapse ring reaches Midtown, the Fourth Ward, EaDo, the Heights' southern edge and the University of Houston–Downtown. Third-degree burns extend to about 7.5 km over Montrose, the Museum District, the Third Ward and the Washington Avenue corridor; the 14.5 km ring of broken windows reaches the Texas Medical Center, Rice University, the Galleria's edge, the Ship Channel's western turning basin and Hobby Airport's approach.
Greater Houston has about 7 million residents but is one of the least dense big cities in the world, so a 300-kiloton warhead over downtown reaches well under two million people — far fewer than in any Asian or European city of similar size. The land is flat coastal plain. The refineries and petrochemical plants along the Ship Channel, at the outer ring's edge, would make a strike here an industrial as well as a human disaster. See Effects of a nuclear explosion.
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