I seriously had no idea how many nuclear weapons have been detonated on our planet. Of course I knew they'd tested one prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I knew the US and the Soviets had done testing during the cold war, then of course France (as in these incredible and equally horrific photos), China and the Brits (mostly here in Australia). I knew that India and Pakistan did some and that Israel has some but I wasn't sure if they'd tested any and finally I knew that North Korea had tested twice.
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| The 1970 French 914-kiloton Licorne ('Unicorn') test on the Fangataufa atoll |
So with all of that I figured maybe 200 odd tests all up... yeah right, oh what a naive fool I have been. The number of nuclear weapon explosions on our tiny little third rock from the sun is 2153 (although some sources vary, Wikipedia says 2119). Holy shit! That is a bat shit crazy number!
The gang at Orbitalmechanics.io have put together this video which shows every single one of the explosions, their location, date and size. Most appear as small dots in the kiloton size range, but wait until you see the Tsar bomb detonated by the Russians, 50 megatons. Ridiculously monstrous in its size, done purely to thumb their noses at the US, it destroyed every building within a 55km radius.
Can we just stop now please.
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