The map above simulates a 300-kiloton nuclear airburst over Paris, France — 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 11.2 million people — the rings above are drawn to real scale over their homes.
The marker is on the Hôtel de Ville, next to the Île de la Cité. The 1.9 km zone of total destruction covers Notre-Dame, the Marais, the Louvre's eastern wing, the Latin Quarter and Les Halles; the 4.7 km collapse ring reaches the Opéra, the Bastille, the Panthéon, the Gare du Nord and the Place de la Concorde. Third-degree burns extend to about 7.5 km — the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Montparnasse, Gare de Lyon, Père-Lachaise — and the 14.5 km ring of broken windows covers the whole of Paris inside the Périphérique plus Saint-Denis, Montreuil, Boulogne and the edge of La Défense.
Paris inside the ring road is one of the densest cities in the developed world, with 2.1 million people on 105 square kilometres, nearly all of it inside the burn ring. The Haussmann blocks are sturdy stone but collapse at 5 psi like anything else. France keeps about 290 warheads on submarines and aircraft; see Nuclear arsenals. The 800-kiloton Topol scenario shows a larger single warhead.
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