Nuclear weaponry video

[scott_sanford]

Somehow I've managed to miss this until now. It's a video by Isao Hashimoto illustrating all 2053 nuclear explosions from 1945 until 1988.

Several things come to mind watching this, like the odd musical track made by the 'ping' sound effect when a nuke goes off. Testing tended to run in clusters, so you get interesting emergent music - like birdsong, only with radioactivity. Also, the US has maintained its head start in nuking things pretty well; about half of all mushroom clouds were ours.

The most important point is of course that 2051 nukes were popped off essentially to see what would happen. After the second and third units, nobody anywhere ever actually used any of them on somebody else. Good for you, humanity.

Comments

[seawasp]

I think the other important point is that over those years the equivalent of a medium-sized thermonuclear exchange was conducted in-atmosphere and didn't cause a nuclear winter or irradiate huge areas of a continent to unliveability.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Good point. We blew off 2000 nukes and did not destroy humanity - we didn't have nearly enough anyway, it seems.

There's apparently some speculation that this did have a 'nuclear autumn' effect, as climactic warming leveled off between the mid-40s and the Nuclear Test Ban treaty - but this is disputed by others. I'm sure that both a silver lining for nuclear weapons and the implication that humans could fix global warming with a known technology would be equally offensive in some political circles.