Nukes, kids and the Cold War: In conversation with the creator of Nukemap3D

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Nukemap3D produces virtual mushroom clouds

Feeling cheerful? Why not remedy that by going online and seeing what would happen if someone dropped an H-bomb on your hometown? The browser-based Nukemap3D uses a Google Earth plug in to produce a 3D graphic of the effects of a nuclear weapon on your city of choice. All you have to do is pick your target, select your favorite thermonuclear device, and you can see an animated mushroom cloud rising over ground zero. Gizmag caught up with the creator, Dr. Alex Wellerstein, to talk about Nukemap3D.
Wellerstein is Associate Historian at the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, and specializes in the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy. He has taught courses in his specialty at Harvard and studies the question of secrecy in the story of nuclear weapons. In a telephone interview, he gave us the lowdown on Nukemap3D. Where did the idea for Nukemap come from?
Nukemap came out of my experience of trying to teach about [the history of nuclear weapons] to undergraduates, who completely missed the Cold War and aren't thinking about nuclear weapons at all and don’t have much cultural association with them.
So the Cold War and Hiroshima were all ancient history for them?
It was really ancient history. I’m not a very old person myself. I’m in my early thirties and I have memories of the Berlin Wall coming down. My wife is a high school teacher and she’s actually had students say “oh, my God, you were alive during the Cold War!” like it was somebody saying that they fought in World War One. So, one of the difficulties of teaching the subject is getting the students to take things seriously because a lot of the concerns of the 1960s or even the '80s were very remote and very unrealistic and not something they can easily relate to. They ask, “why were people afraid of Communism?” My question was, “how can I make that fresh for somebody, so they can relate it to the big issues of the present and the issues of the past.