I grew up in a suburb of Boston, northwest of the city. It was near Hanscom Air Force base, as well as Lincoln Labs and the headquarters of Raytheon. Thus, if the US and USSR had started flinging ICBMs at each other, my house definitely would have been glowing. But I always used to wonder exactly how everyone I knew would have died. Would our house have survived the initial blast long enough to burn in the massive firestorms that follow the nuclear blast? Would we have lasted long enough to die from radiation poisoning? Luckily a rather morbid individual named Eric Meyer created a Google Maps tool to map the effects of nuclear explosions. And, assuming a yield of 550 kilotons from a Soviet SS-19, my house would have been destroyed in the initial blast. Click this link to see the map.
On reading the map: Everything in the smallest circle would be flat. The next smallest circle represents 5 PSI, that means that most buildings that aren't blast-resistant would be destroyed. My old house falls in the outer area of that region. Since it's made of wood, we can safely say that my house would have been flattened in WW3.
Have a nice day.
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