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City scenario

Los Angeles nuclear blast radius

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Los Angeles is a spread-out basin. A 15 kt airburst over Downtown is a small disk on that map. The page is useful because it kills the myth that ‘a nuke’ automatically equals the whole metro.

Open Los Angeles in the 3D simulator

Educational estimate only. Blast and heat rings use simplified yield scaling. They ignore terrain, weather, shielding, and weapon design. Casualty counts use WorldPop 2020 residents on an approximately 1 km grid and ignore time of day, commuting, shelter, and evacuation. This is not a targeting or civil-defense tool. About the model.

Aim point: Downtown Los Angeles · Weapon: Little Boy (15 kt, 543 m (1,780 ft) optimum airburst)

Ground ranges for Little Boy (15 kt, 543 m (1,780 ft) optimum airburst) in this simulator.
Effect Ground range What the model means
Fireball 266 m (872 ft) Maximum luminous radius
20 psi 839 m (2,751 ft) Heavy destruction
5 psi 1.8 km (1.1 mi) Most buildings collapse
Thermal 2.0 km (1.3 mi) 3rd-degree burns
1 psi 4.2 km (2.6 mi) Windows shatter
Rings scaled to 1 psi. Yellow fireball, red 20 psi, orange 5 psi, gold thermal, blue 1 psi. Not a map of buildings.

Casualty estimate at this pin

People on the WorldPop 2020 grid inside this scenario’s 1 psi ring. Rounded educational estimate, not a forecast.
Estimated deaths 39,304
Estimated injuries 93,605
Residents inside 1 psi 339,299

What the rings cover

Inner rings sit on Downtown and the immediate grid. 5 psi covers a portion of the central city. 1 psi reaches into nearby neighbourhoods and leaves most of the basin, the Valley, and the coastal cities outside the model.

The pin sits on the downtown core, not on LAX or a Hollywood sign centroid. Downtown is denser than the basin average, so the WorldPop line is higher than a burst over a parking-lot suburb would be.

Compared with Paris or Manhattan, 5 psi here is a handful of neighbourhoods. Santa Monica, the Valley, and Long Beach sit far outside 1 psi in this model.

For a strategic-yield comparison, open the W88 page and launch Los Angeles from there. This URL stays on Little Boy so US city pages share a baseline with London and New York.

Related pages

New York · Mexico City · London · Hiroshima

All cities and sites

City index · Historic sites · Weapon yields

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