good teaching move

We were discussing nuclear proliferation in class today. Using this GOOGLE MAPS NUCLEAR BLAST SIMULATOR, the same one Nina linked to awhile ago, we successively nuked Paris, Cairo, and Chicago. The student reaction was just about what I hoped it would be: terrified, but fascinated rather than offended.

You can choose between Little Boy (Hiroshima, U-235, cannon assembly), Fat Man (Nagasaki, plutonium, implosion assembly), and several larger bombs all the way up to the Soviet Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton beast tested successfully in Siberia (world’s largest ever). There’s also an asteroid option, though it’s mostly just a gimmick, since that would depend entirely on the size of the asteroid (left unspecified in the app).

Once I went and targeted my tiny hometown of 3,000 souls with the Tsar Bomba, and of course most of the county was destroyed and not just the town.

Anyway, it’s an ingenious app and a fantastic teaching tool, especially when I followed it with YouTube “After” footage of Hiroshima, which actually led to audible gasps in the room.