One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is a binder with a spine labeled “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS.” A megadeath, writes Eric Schlosser in a New Yorker piece on the movie, “was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.” The destructive capability of nuclear weapons having only increased since 1964, we might well wonder how many megadeaths would result from a nuclear strike on a major city today.
In collaboration with the Nobel Peace Prize, filmmaker Neil Halloran addresses that question in the video above, which visualizes a simulated nuclear explosion in a city of four million. “We’ll assume the bomb is detonated in the air to maximize the radius of impact, as was done in Japan in 1945. But here, we’ll use an 800-kiloton warhead, a relatively large bomb in today’s arsenals, and 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The immediate result would be a “fireball as hot as the sun” with a radius of 800 meters; all buildings within a two-kilometer radius would be destroyed, “and we’ll assume that virtually no one survives inside this area.”
Already in these calculations, the death toll has reached 120,000. “From as far as away as eleven kilometers, the radiant heat from the blast would be strong enough to cause third-degree burns on exposed skin.” Though most people would be indoors and thus sheltered from that at the time of the explosion, “the very structures that offered this protection would then become a cause of injury, as debris would rip through buildings and rain down on city streets.” This would, over the weeks after the attack, ultimately cause another 500,000 casualties — another half a megadeath — with another 100,000 at longer range still to occur.
These are sobering figures, to be sure, but as Halloran reminds us, the Cold War is over; unlike in Dr. Strangelove’s day, families no longer build fallout shelters, and schoolchildren no longer do nuclear-bomb drills. Nevertheless, even though nations aren’t as on edge about total annihilation as they were in the mid-twentieth-century, the technologies that potentially cause such annihilation are more advanced than ever, and indeed, “nuclear weapons remain one of the great threats to humanity.” Here in the twenty-twenties, “countries big and small face the prospect of new arms races,” a much more complicated geopolitical situation than the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union — and, perhaps, one beyond the reach of even Kubrickianly grim satire.
Related content:
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Why Hiroshima, Despite Being Hit with the Atomic Bomb, Isn’t a Nuclear Wasteland Today
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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