With some emerging cyber-technology you just don’t know where you’re heading. I think I came across “Ground Zero” while browsing 2Bangkok.com. It’s not really a game: It lets you choose a location on Google Maps and detonate various types of bombs over it to see the extent of the impact.

Naturally I laid a thud on Bangkok, trying to see if I was safe in the outlying suburbs, but I couldn’t get the program to stay put in one spot on the map long enough to calculate how far the nuclear winter would extend.

Anyway, if they start popping nukes, NO ONE IS SAFE. I thought we were all clear on that point.

I suppose “Ground Zero” is a history lesson, in the sense that the bombs are all famous characters from the tale of man’s inhumanity to man, from the 15-kilotonne Little Boy that smoked Hiroshima to the Soviet Union’s 50-megatonne Tsar Bomba, which in 1961 created “the largest explosion ever”.

If your ears can stand the imagined noise, you can also select Fat Man (21kt for Nagasaki), the Mk28 (1.4mt, 1958) on which Slim Pickens rode to Earth (and Heaven) in “Dr Strangelove”, the B61 (340kt, 1991) now riding on US fighter jets and China’s DF-31 (140kt for intercontinental missiles).

For comparison’s sake, you can also re-create the Chicxulub meteor impact that rid the world of the dinosaur nuisance.

Get trigger-happy here.

“Ground Zero” comes courtesy of Carlos Labs, “a Data Architecture, Integration and Consulting firm registered in Sydney, Australia”. They have nothing to do with nuclear weapons; they deal in computer doodads, or as the website puts it, “the evolution of the data universe”.

I wonder if they’ve seen “On the Beach”, in which Gregory Peck flees as far as he can get from a nuclear war — to Australia. (Spoiler: In vain, as it turned out.)

I could’t find much amusement in Carlos Labs’ “Cycloid” either.