Nate Silver just recently posted a joke on Twitter about how many people would be left to vote after a nuclear strike on America, following a tweet by President-Elect Donald Trump about nuclear war. Here’s what he wrote:
Here's what the electoral map would look like if only people who weren't burnt to a crisp in the nuclear holocaust voted. pic.twitter.com/MsrkuOjZWi
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 23, 2016
Well, we decided to look at what some experts think would actually happen in a nuclear war, only to discover that opinions are very varied. In fact, Modern Survival Blog has a number of nuclear fallout maps with all different predictions from all different people. So they looked at everything and put together their own map of nuclear targets in the U.S. Essentially, most of the United States is a giant red blob full of targets, but a few states escaped almost unscathed. We put together a new map, showing just those states voting, as indicated in blue below. Of course, this map is just showing places where bombs might not hit, it’s not really scientific:
This also isn’t accounting for fallout winds. It’s really tough to predict where anyone might survive, since it all highly depends on where a nuke lands, your access to a bunker, etc. So it’s possible that Nate Silver’s prediction might be more accurate. However, considering how close Alaska is to Russia, we had a hard time leaving it untouched on our map, so we didn’t include it above.
What do you think?
For a fun comparison, we made an electoral college map for after a zombie apocalypse, based on a study by Estately Real Estate Search. This one might actually be more accurate than the nuclear war one:
They used five criteria to determine which states were most likely to survive a zombie apocalypse (fewest people per square mile, gun ownership per capita, physically active population, interest in zombie media.) Honestly, we feel that Texas should be on this map too, but that’s not what Estately found.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
