I'm a cheerful, optimistic sort of chap and yet growing up in the '70s and '80s under what seemed then to be a very real threat of deliberate or accidental nuclear exchange, I carry with me a legacy of that era in the form of:
a) a chilling fear of extinction or near-extinction through escalating nuclear exchanges
b) a morbid fascination of it
So over the years I have lingered on several simulators (remember NUKEMAP? https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) and knowledge bases (I know how to construct a positive airflow survival bunker with air scrubbers and decontamination capabilities). And I have picked up countless other not very useful skills and knowledge nuggets.
My mushroom cloud antennae were twitching today however as I caught the tailwind of Ivan Stepanov's project, Nuclear War Simulator (http://nuclearwarsimulator.com/). Using Unity to power its systems, the goal of the project is to be able to simulate large-scale nuclear exchanges with a realistic focus on humanitarian consequences. What will happen if India and Pakistan light off a couple (or all of their) nukes? Can the USA and Russia survive a total nuclear exchange? This simulator can help tell that story and illustrate how things will turn out (hint: usually quite badly).
Watch an example here:
Currently you can download the latest version of the simulator and play with it (https://ivan-stepanov.itch.io/nuclear-war-simulator) and you can do this for free or drop a donation to the developer.
There are as of right now 9 nuclear-armed states in the world with over 14,000 nuclear weapons between them, an incredible number that is not only hard to conceive but is also more than enough to render us extinct.
Nuclear weapons uniquely remain as the most indiscriminate and inhumane threats to human life, the global environment, international security, and international law.
The money we humans as a species spend every year on building new nuclear weapons, maintaining existing nuclear weapons, and developing and testing future nuclear weapons, could instead be used to meet an incredible range and depth of human needs around the world. But instead, each year we slavishly divert huge amounts of public resources away from our needs and into our potential doom.
To find out more about the catastrophic harm from nuclear weapon use: https://www.icanw.org/catastrophic_harm
To glimpse the extent that public resources are diverted away from real wants and needs: https://www.icanw.org/diversion_of_public_resources
In the words of former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon: "The world is over-armed and peace is under-funded..."
The developer would like his project to highlight the cause of eliminating all nuclear weapons (https://www.icanw.org/). I can only imagine living in a world where the threat of nuclear arsenals is but a memory. How wonderful it would be if our children inherited from us a world free of such things.
Let me ask you - if you had the power to take some of the nuclear weapons budgets from nations around the world, and spend it instead on some grand global project for the good of humankind... what would you spend it on? What would you set into motion? What would you build? What would you solve? What would you eradicate?
Anyway, I hope you investigate some of these resources. Me, I'm off to watch an episode or two of The Walking Dead, play some Project Zomboid, then read a book before bedtime. Something like On The Beach.
Don't have nightmares ;-)