Nuclear war simulator is a detailed realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the question: what will happen if Russia and the United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals?

You can design warheads, missiles and carries, place them on the map and execute attack plans to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what are the consequences. Using a high-resolution population map and realistic weapons effects like blast, heat and radiation you can make an estimate of how many people will die in a conflict.

Nuclear conflict scenarios

You can design realistic large-scale scenarios between major powers with thousands of warheads. Scenarios can be created manually where you can assign each warhead individually or with the assistance of an AI for faster targeting. It is also possible to simulate whole conflicts with a few clicks. You can download scenarios created by other people and upload your scenarios to the mods.io server.

Realistic effects of nuclear weapons

The simulation includes a high-resolution population density grid. The effects of blast, heat, fires and radiation are calculated and visualized for each population cell (similar to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP). The destruction of military targets is simulated using a model considering the CEP of the weapon, target hardness to overpressure and cratering.

You can place individuals like yourself, your family and friends into the simulation to estimate the expected injuries and survival probability. The amount of burnt fuel and produced soot are also calculated to estimate the effects of nuclear winter using a simplified model.

Currently implemented features:

visualize and calculate effects of nuclear weapons (thermal radiation, overpressure, fallout and mass fires) on a high-density population grid (similar to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP)

visualization of overpressure, thermal radiation, prompt radiation, the radiation dose from fallout, areas affected by mass fires, population density and casualties density

effects from hundreds to thousands of explosions can be calculated and visualized in seconds

calculate the amount of fuel burnt in cities and soot leading to global cooling

design and place nuclear forces to recreate current, past or future arsenals using an intuitive UI, import real-world databases as KMZ files

create attack plans and conflict scenarios and share them with others

place yourself, your family and your friends inside the simulation and calculate the probability of your survival

simulate the dynamics and timing of the conflict and effects of a first strike using a damage model based on CEP, overpressure and cratering

simple production cost model: how many weapons can a country build if it wants to?

basic modding capability: blueprints, unit textures, loading screens, background music, upload and download scenarios to the mod.io server and share them with others

Some more details can be found in the screenshots-section. Technical details on the models and databases being used here will be added soon. Follow me on twitter to stay updated.

Work in progress

This simulation is not yet finished. Some aspects are not very accurate or missing entirely: ballistic missiles flight times are only approximate, nuclear winter model is not complete. Some models may have to be replaced completely in the future. Please let me know if you detect some severe inaccuracies. If you think you can use this simulation in one of your projects but some calculation or visualization is missing please contact me and I will try to implement it.