Nuclear War & Test Simulator

A new simulator is in development that will provide realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. It lets you design conflict scenarios and estimate the consequences using a population density map and realistic weapons effects. It is being developed by Ivan Stepanov. This simulator will show just why these weapons need to be destroyed and governments around the world need to come together and never develop or use them again.

About the Simulator

Nuclear War Simulator is a detailed realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the question: what will happen if Russia and the United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals?

You can design warheads, missiles, and carries, place them on the map and execute attack plans to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what are the consequences. Using a high-resolution population density map and realistic weapons effects like blast, heat, and radiation you can make an estimate of how many people will die in a conflict.

Nuclear conflict scenarios

You can design realistic large-scale scenarios between major powers with thousands of warheads. Scenarios can be created manually where you can assign each warhead individually or with the assistance of an AI for faster targeting. It is also possible to simulate whole conflicts with a few clicks on the map interactively. You can download scenarios created by other people and upload your scenarios to the mods.io server.

Realistic effects of nuclear weapons

The simulation includes a high-resolution population density grid. The effects of blast, heat, fires, and radiation are calculated and visualized for each population cell to estimate fatalities (similar to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP). The destruction of military targets is simulated using a model considering the CEP of the weapon, target hardness, and cratering.

You can place yourself, your family, and friends into the simulation to estimate the expected injuries and survival probability. The amount of burnt fuel and produced soot are also calculated to estimate the effects of nuclear winter using a simplified model.

Design and placement of objects

Using an intuitive UI you can design warheads, place them on missiles and into silos, on aircraft, TELs, and submarines. You can then place the forces onto the map simply clicking on it or importing real-world locations from KMZ files. If you know how much uranium and plutonium are needed for one warhead, you can estimate how many can be built from today’s stockpiles if a country wants to.

Modding and interfaces

The simulation supports some basic modding of unit textures, loading screens, and background music. It is also possible to share unit blueprints and scenarios with others. If you have simulated a conflict in another tool you can import the list of detonations as a simple CSV file to calculate the humanitarian effects. On the other hand, you can also export the list of detonations together with the burnt soot into other tools like detailed climate simulations.

You can map a single explosion, which will allow us to map out how explosions would affect the world today.

You can find out more about the simulator here - https://nuclearwarsimulator.com/

Ivan grew up in Semipalatinsk and has translated many newspaper articles about the victims of nuclear weapons testing. You can view them here - https://nuclearwarsimulator.com/semipalatinsk-newspapers/

We will be working with Ivan to produce a simulation of the tests across the world if they happened today. So that the destruction and devastation can be seen in a visual form. Ivan has kindly produced a video of three of the tests, Operation Hurricane, Operation Grapple Y, and the Housatonic shot of Operation Dominic.

Using this simulator, we can show the world the destructive power of these weapons, how the tests affected the world and why they should never be used and it will show visually the effect of these weapons on our planet.