How many nuclear weapons have exploded on Earth?
Just the two, you say?
Oh, right. Duh: we’ve got to include all those notorious “test shots” back in the Cold War days. So maybe, umm… a hundred? A couple-three hundred, tops. Right?
Hahahaha.
This video comes courtesy of Dr. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog, which yesterday marked — “celebrated” being absolutely the wrong word — the fiftieth anniversary of a spectacular/ghastly (take your pick) test: a 1.4-megaton explosion in space. (And not, like, way out past the moon or anything: a relatively mere 240 miles up.)
The video’s title, “1945-1998,” indicates its scope. For the first three explosions, the “clock” at the top right moves slowly. The global view zooms to the specific location, and there’s a little ping with each one. But then the pace picks up. A beep every second marks a month of calendar time, and the tone which accompanies a given explosion’s “marker” (as well as its size) seems to vary with the explosion’s yield*: those pings for the smaller, something more like oboe toots for the big shots. Running tallies in the top and bottom margins indicate how many explosions took place under the ægis of specific countries.
The video is the work of artist Isao Hashimoto; a few more details available here.
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* The Wired (UK) article which seems to have first publicized the video says that the pings/toots are synced with the country which fired the explosion, but I didn’t get this. To me, the countries seemed to be indicated just by the colors of the circular blurs for the various explosions. But, y’know, this is probably the sort of argument over detail that civilized people often throw up to distract themselves from uncomfortably room-sized elephants.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
methinks that your laughter was not nearly maniacal, enough. Once again, America leading the way in technology. Some things are better left un-emulated by burgeoning nations & states.
Also interesting corollary reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty.
John says
Reading about the US’s official reasons for not having ratified the Test Ban Treaty — across multiple Administrations and Congresses — is maddening. It’s like listening to a kid make excuses for not doing something he professes to take really, really seriously, like homework. “No no no, you don’t understand. I just can’t do it! The assignment didn’t meet all my criteria for good homework assignments!”
Interesting that apparently the current objection, as I understand it, is safety concerns. Like, “If we can’t test nuclear weapons, we have no way of knowing whether they’ve been built safely.” All I could think was: They’re NUCLEAR WEAPONS for crissake. They’re not SUPPOSED to be “safe.”
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
correction: NOT nearly maniacal, enough….JES: fixed that for ya. :)and lest reCAPTCHA not be sufficiently credited, the word “cynical” is part of my required access at this moment. Hmmmm.
The Querulous Squirrel says
Oh. So you mean that the ocean and space tests COUNTED? And the ones in the desert too? I just thought they count if it’s a big city or the whole planet. We humans are so doomed.
John says
I lean towards almost breezy upbeatness (not necessarily optimism) on many issues. But this is just dumb; even a natural-born Pangloss type can’t help pursing his lips and shaking his head and wanting to storm the Bastilles (hmm, yes, that’s today, isn’t it?) of officialdom.
A comment which I read someplace about the video said something like, “What could they possibly have wanted to learn from the 1,001st test that they didn’t know after #1,000?!?” My thought exactly.
cynth says
I watched this in mounting horror. I kept looking at the year and thinking, oh, surely not, they are not still doing that…I want to know why…why are we still exploding those things? Squirrel is right…we are doomed…
John says
The good (?) news: there haven’t been any tests in a while (except by fringe “powers” like North Korea). The last test by the US took place in 1992 (according to good old Wikipedia). This seems a tacit admission that, yes, the testing — and by implication, official endorsement of the use — can’t be justified. The bad news (as I mentioned above, in a comment to brudder): we continue to strike this quasi-intellectual legalistic pose about why we won’t ratify a treaty which we helped to negotiate.
Of course, one has to factor in that Congress ratifies — or doesn’t — treaties which have been made by the Executive branch. Taken as a whole, despite individual exceptions, our legislators have seldom in recent years shown much backbone about anything critically important. In particular, in this case, there’s an analogy to the gun-control argument: But if we stop testing, then only criminal states will conduct tests! (That is, We don’t want to be regarded as soft on crime.)