Scary. I spent many years atop Blue Steel and WE177 flying the tin triangle.

Didn't realise that there were so many tests by so many countries.

Lets hope that there are no more...

gr4

That was what I was talking about before re Nevada.
Although I had forgotten their were so many.

Whenever I go to Nevada, I only get bombed in Las Vegas. :cool: Good thing I wasn't around for all them nukes, I might not be here.

For those who want to see the craters on Google Maps. Search for Yucca Flat airport and zoom in, the craters are on the north east side of the airport and they run north for quite some distance.

Biggest four ever done were in that area in 1961. Biggest US one was Castle Bravo at Bikini in 1954 at 15Mt and that one was the fifth biggest. The histroy of most of them can be found at

The Nuclear Weapon Archive - A Guide to Nuclear Weapons

With photos and some video.

The scary part of the nuclear test programs was the U.S. and USSR high altitude nuclear test explosions, in what was virtually, Space.
Numerous nuclear test explosions were carried out at altitudes of 150 to 540kms.
The Kármán line, at 100kms out, is generally regarded as the height where Space officially starts.

High-altitude nuclear explosion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fortunately, to some degree, the U.S. and France have been leading the way from the mid-1990's, and have built very large inertial confinement fusion facilities.
These facilities enable the detailed study of the ignition process of thermonuclear explosions.
With these technologies it is possible to conceive and test new weapons in the laboratory, without large scale explosions being needed.

But - even though the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has tried to prevent all nuclear tests - and failed - there is nothing to stop the development of even bigger and better nuclear weapons, without any actual test explosions.

The Doomsday Clock is still at 5 minutes to midnight, even though it has retreated a little from the 2 minutes to midnight, reached at the height of the Cold War.

It is worth remembering that "only" some 500 or so of the 2000 total were atmospheric tests so in the vast majority the radioactivity was contained underground.

It also rather scarily illustrates that even large numbers of these things doesn't wipe out life on earth, or anywhere near it (from the radiological point of view)

For me the most fascinating and in a way eerily beautiful images are those taken with the Rapatronic cameras microseconds after detonation, some displaying the weird "rope tricks" effect from the cable-stays that supported the shot-cab and tower vapourising in the flash. The physics of what is going on there is simply amazing.


There are some amazing pics of the fireball emerging through the side of HMS Plym in the "Hurricane" test at Monte Bello (Aus) but I've only seen them in a book - can't trace them on the web. Maybe someone else can.

Crikey, just watch that western American seaboard light up!
I've seen less flashes in a photographic stroboscopic studio.
I'm sure it's done the San Andreas fault line a power of good....

I was in initial training then and remember being outside one dark night and looking to the north in the vague hope (dread) that we might see something.

It somehow shows the "unexplained" legacy of increasing numbers of cancer cases in a different light.

2000+ sounds like an awful lot...I wonder how many of them are nuclear trigger tests without the aid of the surrounding uranium/plutonium casing?

Sounds eminently sensible to me.