The map above simulates a 300-kiloton nuclear airburst over Moscow, Russia — 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 17 million people — the rings above are drawn to real scale over their homes.
The marker is on the Kremlin. The 1.9 km zone of total destruction covers the Kremlin, Red Square, GUM, the Bolshoi Theatre and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour; the 4.7 km collapse ring reaches the whole Boulevard Ring and most of the Garden Ring — Tverskaya, Arbat, Kitay-gorod, the Lubyanka. Third-degree burns extend to about 7.5 km over Moscow City's towers, Gorky Park, the Three Stations and Taganka; the 14.5 km ring of broken windows reaches the Third Ring Road and beyond — Luzhniki, VDNKh's approach, Sokolniki, Sparrow Hills.
About 13 million people live inside the MKAD and the central districts are dense Stalin-era and pre-revolutionary blocks that collapse readily at 5 psi. The land is nearly flat. Moscow is protected by the A-135 missile-defence system, the only one of its kind around a capital, and Western planning in the Cold War assumed dozens of warheads would be aimed at it. For larger weapons over the same point see the 1.2-megaton B83 and the 100-megaton extreme.
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