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City scenario

Shanghai nuclear blast radius

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Shanghai’s riverfront is a dense mix of historic Bund, Lujiazui towers, and packed districts. A 15 kt airburst here is a core-city scenario, not a map of the whole municipality.

Open Shanghai 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: The Bund / Huangpu River core · 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 315,921
Estimated injuries 594,279
Residents inside 1 psi 2,152,747

What the rings cover

Inner rings sit on the riverfront core. 5 psi covers a slice of Huangpu and the near bank. 1 psi can cross the river and still leave most of Pudong and Puxi outside the model.

The pin sits on the Huangpu core so the rings read against the Bund and the opposite bank rather than against a suburban industrial park. Casualty counts follow WorldPop 2020 residents, not daytime office load.

Shanghai municipality is enormous. These rings do not reach the outer districts. That is the comparison this whole city series is making: Hiroshima-scale versus a twenty-first-century megacity.

Photorealistic 3D tiles, where Pro coverage exists, make the river and tower heights easier to feel than a 2D blast map. The numbers on this page do not require Pro.

Related pages

Tokyo · Hong Kong · Seoul · New York

All cities and sites

City index · Historic sites · Weapon yields

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