Doomsday 'Nukemap' reveals effect of a Putin attack on Wiltshire

Using Nukemap, an interactive nuclear weapons effects simulator created by US Professor Alex Wellerstein, it is possible to get a picture of what the worst-case scenario would look like.

Although nuclear targets are state secrets and therefore it is impossible to know exactly what would be in Putin’s sights for World War Three, it is possible to calculate the likely effects of nuclear attacks on projected targets in Wiltshire.

For the purposes of this report, two possible targets were chosen – RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire airbase 13 miles from Swindon where the USAF has stationed four B-52H Stratofortress bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and Tidworth, the headquarters of a number of Wiltshire regiments.

Assuming a nuclear strike of a 10 megaton bomb hitting Tidworth, it would cause a fireball with a two-mile radius stretching over 12 square miles.

“Anything inside the fireball is effectively vaporized,” calculates Professor Wellerstein, director of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

The explosion would cause radiation with a radius of two miles, covering 13.8 square miles. This would likely prove fatal to everyone inside the area within one month, and 15 per cent of any survivors “will eventually die of cancer as a result of exposure”.

And that’s if the blast did not kill them. The Nukemap calculates that the radius of the heavy blast would be 4.6 miles over an area of 26 square miles.

“Heavily built concrete buildings would be demolished or severely damaged, fatalities would approach 100 per cent,” predicts Professor Wellerstein.

The moderate blast damage would stretch to six miles around Tidworth, covering 118 square miles and causing most homes to collapse, causing “universal injuries and widespread fatalities and the high risk of fire starting in residential and commercial buildings”.

In homes and buildings for 15 miles around Tidworth, across an area of 779 square miles, the explosion would shatter all the windows, causing more injuries.

And people within 17 miles of the blast would experience third-degree burns which, Professor Wellerstein notes, “extend throughout the layers of skin, and are often painless because they destroy the pain nerves, they can cause severe scarring or disablement, and can require amputation”.

Nukemap shows that a 50 megaton bomb on RAF Fairford would leave very little left of Wiltshire

But if that is not nightmarish enough, a second simulation, of a 50 megaton bomb - the biggest that Putin is known to have in his nuclear arsenal - exploded over RAF Fairford, would pretty much take out almost all of Wiltshire, with only areas close to Westbury, Warminster and Salisbury not experiencing the worst effects.

This would include a 30 square mile fireball, heavy blast damage across 78 square miles, fatal radiation over 30 square miles and third-degree burns injuring people living within 3,200 square miles of the blast.