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More than 30,000 people could be killed if a North Korean hydrogen bomb was detonated in the centre of Liverpool, according to a computer programme.

The website Nukemap predicts that the blast from a 10 kiloton hydrogen bomb detonated at Liverpool Lime Street station could kill 90% of people within 0.7 miles of the station.

North Korean officials claimed to have successfully completed a test of a 10kt bomb earlier this month - and there would be devastation in the improbable event that a bomb that big hit the city centre.

The website calculates that a nuclear fireball would wipe out an area with a radius of 150m in all directions.

The radiation fall out zone would take in Liverpool James Street and the Royal Liverpool University Hospital with people having a 50 to 90% chance of dying from the “acute effects”, without medical treatment.

Created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology, the website says it could take between several hours and several weeks for people to die from the effects of the radiation dose.

There would also be a radius of about a mile in which there is a “100 per cent probability for third degree burns”, which can cause severe scarring and need amputation to treat.

Most buildings would collapse within that mile’s radius and injuries would be “universal”.

Nuclear experts have doubted North Korea’s claim, though. They believe the size of the test blast is unlikely to have been big enough to be a hydrogen bomb.

The destruction would be considerably worse if a larger bomb was detonated.

The most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested is the Russian Tsar Bomba, which was tested in October 1961.

Had that landed in Liverpool, there would be an estimated 1,751,560 fatalities and 3,177,020 injuries, with people in Stoke and Morecambe likely to be affected by thermal radiation.

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