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.