There are around 15,600 nuclear weapons scattered across the world, but even just one of those could likely obliterate the city that you're living in while reading this post.
A thought you may never have come across however, is how close are you right now at this moment to one of these apocalypses waiting to happen.
If you are watching this video right now anywhere south of the Equator, South America, Africa, or any of these other countries then congratulations! There are no known nuclear weapons inside your country so there's no need to worry too much.
Nuclear weapons, much like polar bears, are known to only inhabit the Northern Hemisphere. But if instead you're watching this video in any of these countries (marked red), then there are in fact nuclear weapons somewhere, and you individually are likely somewhat close to one of them. Here is a map of the estimated locations of every nuke in the world, and each dot could represent up to thousands of different weapons.
As you can see, most of them are concentrated in the US, west Europe, Russia, Israel, the Pakistan-India border and east Asia.
But let's zoom into the United States to get a much closer look first.
The United States stores her nuclear weapons in these ten states (marked blue) in these various locations. This storage area on the Pacific coast, for example, is only 18 miles away from Seattle, and this other base is literally located within the city of Albuquerque inside New Mexico, and is home to the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex.
That name may not sound familiar, but it is actually the single largest concentration of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.
The size of the facility is incredible, taking up 28,000 m^2 (301,389 ft^2) located entirely underground, with the potential to store over 3000 bombs inside, or about 19% of all the nuclear weapons in the world.
Many of the weapons inside are waiting to be carefully disarmed, and when they are, they are taken out of the base, taken up the road, and onto interstate 40, where they are then driven to a plant here in Amarillo, Texas where the disarmament actually happens.
So if you've ever driven between Amarillo and Albuquerque, then there is a slight chance that you've cut off a truck driver before, who happened to be carrying a nuclear bomb inside.
Moving up a bit to the north is America's Armed Nuclear Response, a huge area, dotted with nuclear silos ready to fire at the order of the President of the United States.
There are hundreds of silos scattered across Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado.
This particular nuclear silo in Colorado is the closest one to a major city, located only 77 miles north of Denver.
The only other two places in the US where nukes are stored,
are on this base in Missouri, located about 55 miles from Kansas City, and on this naval base in Georgia, located just 32 miles north of Jacksonville, Florida.
That's all of the known nukes on this continent, so let's jump over to Europe to take a look over here.
The United States is the only country in the world that stores
nuclear weapons in other countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey.
These nuclear weapons are stored in these exact locations within those countries, and some are very close to major cities, like Rotterdam, Venice, Milan, Cologne and Brussels.
The United Kingdom and France posses nuclear weapons of their own in addition to those by the United States in Europe
and they store their nuclear weapons very near to Glasgow and London in Britain, and near Marseille and central France
in the case of France.
Over in the Middle East, the only known nuclear positions are those of the United States, here in Adana, Turkey, but Israel likely stores their nuclear weapons in positions within the center of their country, all within an hour drive of each other, and near to Jerusalem.
Back up again to Europe, and Russia is in possession of the most nuclear weapons of any country in the world, but keeps it a very guarded secret of where exactly they are stored.
Using a best-educated guess, acquired from publicly available information however, and we can estimate that the positions of nuclear weapons within Russia are all over the place, but concentrated nearby several major cities, like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok and Saratov.
In the case of Saratov, a city with a population of nearly one million people, the city is surrounded by a missile division,
a strategic bomber base, and a storage facility, together containing over 1,000 nuclear warheads, or 6% of all the nuclear weapons in the world.
Moving across the continent, to Asia, we can see the estimated placements of the nuclear weapons owned by both Pakistan and India, and the only other nukes on this continent are owned by the Chinese and the North Koreans.
China likely has nukes placed in storage all across the country, in these locations, and North Korea meanwhile is kind of the wildcard when it comes to nuclear weapon locations.
North Korea has detonated five nuclear weapons so far, and is believed to be in possession of 15-22 nuclear weapons currently.
It's unknown exactly where these weapons are stored inside the country, but given that that biggest city and capital of South Korea, Seoul, is only 35 miles south of the North Korean border it is likely that the north would have at least some nuclear weapons relatively close by.
What is perhaps the most frightening of all, however, is the unknown nuclear weapons, the bombs that have somehow managed to get lost, and where nobody knows of their current location.
Throughout history, the United States has confirmed to have somehow lost 11 different nuclear weapons.
Many of these are at the bottom of the ocean, like when a plane carrying a nuke just rolled off an aircraft carrier and into the Pacific Ocean, just 80 just 80 miles off the coast of Japan's Ryukyu Island chain.
Or the time that a bomber was carrying two nuclear bombs
over the Mediterranean Sea and simply vanished in a storm
never to be seen again.
But then there's the ones that really keep you up at night.
Like the plane that crashed over the state of North Carolina
that actually dropped two hydrogen bombs over the area.
Neither of them detonated and one of them was found in a tree, but the other actually hit the ground and buried itself 50 meters below the surface.
The government never found it, and bought the land around the crash site to prevent people digging around and looking for it in the future.
Another plane crashed somewhere around here over Greenland, and dropped four hydrogen bombs over the island. Three of those bombs were found, but another one slammed itself into the ice and to this day has never been found.
The final and most frightening instance of a lost nuke is perhaps the time a bomber crashed over the state of Georgia
and jettisoned out its nuclear bomb into the Atlantic Ocean.
The bomb landed less than half a mile off the coast of the state, and just 12 miles away from the City of Savannah, which is home to over 100,000 people.
To this day, it has never been discovered, and if for some reason it were to ever go off then it would probably annihilate the entire city.
And if all of this isn't enough to keep you up at night, then you must also know that Russia has potentially lost up to 40 of their own nuclear weapons, in addition to those lost by the United States.
Which means that there could be as many as 51 nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, that anybody could possibly discover on purpose or by accident, and nobody can tell you exactly where they are.
So thank you for reading this post.
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