The numbers for the US and the USSR don't surprise me, but I never realized France conducted as many nuclear tests as they did.

Maybe the title should be changed to Two Thousand and Fifty Four Nuclear Explosions - 2052 of them were tests, 2 of them were actual uses. Just ask Japan.

*doublepromote

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, June 20th, 2010 1:29pm PDT - doublepromote requested by kronosposeidon.

Are these nuclear weapon tests or or does it include nuclear reactor tests as well? At the end when it overlaid all the tests there was one somewhere around Louisiana or Mississippi, and I don't recall a nuclear weapon test in that area.

I only saw the count go to 2,053. I feel jipped.

Shall we play a game?

Ha, I didn't notice that number at the end until you pointed it out, Stingray. I guess things aren't so bad after all.

Simon

>> ^ponceleon:

Would you like to play a game?


It reminds me of DEFCON too: http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/ ...

... and Iran is supposedly a threat ... the complaint coming from the nation with the greatest number of nuclear tests, and the only nation on the planet to actually use it against a civilian population resulting in mass casualties.

LoL during the cold war everyone was afraid of the US and USSR nuking each other... all the while the US and USSR are actually nuking the crap out of THEMSELVES hundreds of times over.

If thousands of nukes over 50 years didnt cause the end of the world... would a nuclear war be as bad as they said?

Take away the 2nd and 3rd nuke and I'm gona guess the death toll was near nothing over all those years, because they were tests... in a desert.. or remote area.
If each of those nukes were aimed at a populated city containing stuff people care about and infrastructure. It would be "yabba dabba doo time"

Global Thermonuclear War!
M.A.D. - The Mad Doctrine is based on the principal that if both sides have the capability to annihilate the other, Neither will act!

Stephen Falken: The whole point was to find a way to practice nuclear war without destroying ourselves. To get the computers to learn from mistakes we couldn't afford to make. Except, I never could get Joshua to learn the most important lesson.
David Lightman: What's that?
Stephen Falken: Futility. That there's a time when you should just give up.
Jennifer: What kind of a lesson is that?
Stephen Falken: Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
Jennifer: Yeah, of course.
Stephen Falken: But you don't anymore.
Jennifer: No.
Stephen Falken: Why?
Jennifer: Because it's a boring game. It's always a tie.
Stephen Falken: Exactly. There's no way to win. The game itself is pointless! But back at the war room, they believe you can win a nuclear war. That there can be "acceptable losses."
WAR GAMES

I just wouldn't want to find out....
>> ^raverman:


If thousands of nukes over 50 years didnt cause the end of the world... would a nuclear war be as bad as they said?

Now overlay cancer rates for the same years.

Yes, it would be as bad as they say. Consider one nuke could wipe out an entire city like New York in a flash. That's 8.3 million deaths just inside NYC itself. Now consider that both the US and USSR each had thousands of nukes. Even if only a fraction of them had been used, untold millions, perhaps billions, of lives would have ended, either from the blasts themselves, or radiation sickness, or cancer-related deaths, etc. Plus all the soot and smoke swept up into the atmosphere from the major fires raging all over the planet could cause temporary climate change by reducing the Earth's temperature because of the partially blocked sunlight.

No one knows exactly how bad it would be if a nuclear war took place, but there is no dispute that it would definitely be bad for both the Earth and mankind as a whole if a major exchange of nuclear weapons took place. >> ^raverman:

LoL during the cold war everyone was afraid of the US and USSR nuking each other... all the while the US and USSR are actually nuking the crap out of THEMSELVES hundreds of times over.
If thousands of nukes over 50 years didnt cause the end of the world... would a nuclear war be as bad as they said?

I'd like to play tic tac toe please.

1) They forgot Israel and South Africa in 1979... that would make it 2054.

2) This diagram is awesome.
Looks like the atmospheric vs underground count vs underwater counts are:
US 206/912/5
USSR 223/756/3
UK 21/24
France 50/160
China 22/26
India 0/6
South Africa/Isreal 1/0
Pakistan 0/7
North Korea 0/1

3) The fallout map is fun.

4) The Nevada and Kazakhstan need to surrender already

To me it is incredible that out of the 2,000+ explosions, only 2 were fired "in anger", and those were the 2nd and 3rd events.

There is absolutely no arguing that a full-on nuclear war would be terrible, devastating, and horrendous. However, I think it would be pretty difficult for it to be end-of-humanity apocalyptic. From some quick googling, it looks like a high yield modern nuclear warhead has a blast radius of 6-7 miles, so probably under 150 square miles of area (not counting fallout, lesser blast damage outside of the center, etc.)

So, if every nuclear explosion in history was from an extremely high-yield modern bomb, and they had all been fired at once with the targets spread out to destroy the largest possible total area, they could have utterly destroyed an area a bit bigger than Texas.

I guess that is a pretty grim way to look on the bright side...

>> ^notarobot:

I'd like to play tic tac toe please.


Okay, Global Thermonuclear War it is!

Wonder if this includes the nuclear explosions we (and others) have set off in space.

>> ^raverman:
If thousands of nukes over 50 years didnt cause the end of the world... would a nuclear war be as bad as they said?


That is one of the most frightening opinions I have ever read in my life.

1. Holy shit! I wouldn't have guessed the count to have been 10% of that.
2. How have we not destroyed ourselves completely over the last 70 years?
3. Remind me to take radiation meds before I ever visit the U.S. west coast.

time lapse? where's the time lapse? :-)

>> ^Xax:

1. Holy shit! I wouldn't have guessed the count to have been 10% of that.
2. How have we not destroyed ourselves completely over the last 70 years?
3. Remind me to take radiation meds before I ever visit the U.S. west coast.


1)You're looking at a couple of things. Power projection of devices, the others fall into research, refinement and higher yield.
2)MAD
3)Why? You're more likely to have more issues from Chernobyl then you will from weapons tests. From tritium leaks, or even the sun.

>> ^Mashiki:

>> ^Xax:
1. Holy shit! I wouldn't have guessed the count to have been 10% of that.
2. How have we not destroyed ourselves completely over the last 70 years?
3. Remind me to take radiation meds before I ever visit the U.S. west coast.

1)You're looking at a couple of things. Power projection of devices, the others fall into research, refinement and higher yield.
2)MAD
3)Why? You're more likely to have more issues from Chernobyl then you will from weapons tests. From tritium leaks, or even the sun.


1. What?
2. Huh?
3. I thought it was obvious I was joking; my bad.

Absolutely - No doubt it would be bad...

But objectively how bad? Total Extinction? A 'fallout' world? 90 years uninhabitable with the only survivors living under ground? Or maybe that's the media making the story extra scary. Possibly the Western US has lived with intermittent fallout from tests for years depending on wind direction.

Remembering most of the world population lives in India and China... e.g. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan may actually kill more people than an exchange between the US and say Russia.


>> ^kronosposeidon:

No one knows exactly how bad it would be if a nuclear war took place, but there is no dispute that it would definitely be bad for both the Earth and mankind as a whole if a major exchange of nuclear weapons took place.

Sheesh. Why hasn't California fallen into the Pacific yet?

Those were actual nuclear explosions, both in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They were both underground detonations. I found this: Nuclear Tests In Mississippi? The Consequences of Corporate Controlled Media (it even includes one functioning YouTube video, if someone wants to post it). I too knew none of this, not at all, until I googled it.

I could only find these scant mentions in Wikipedia (though I admit, I didn't dig very deeply):

- Vela Uniform/Project Dribble Nuclear Tests
- Vela Uniform>> ^jimnms:

Are these nuclear weapon tests or or does it include nuclear reactor tests as well? At the end when it overlaid all the tests there was one somewhere around Louisiana or Mississippi, and I don't recall a nuclear weapon test in that area.

I don't know exactly how bad it would be. No one really does. But no one doubts that a major nuclear exchange would cause large scale human suffering, the likes of which humanity probably has never seen before. I don't know if it would be bad enough to doom the human species. I suppose that depends on the severity of the nuclear war. Lots of ifs involved. >> ^raverman:

Absolutely - No doubt it would be bad...
But objectively how bad? Total Extinction? A 'fallout' world? 90 years uninhabitable with the only survivors living under ground? Or maybe that's the media making the story extra scary. Possibly the Western US has lived with intermittent fallout from tests for years depending on wind direction.
Remembering most of the world population lives in India and China... e.g. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan may actually kill more people than an exchange between the US and say Russia.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
No one knows exactly how bad it would be if a nuclear war took place, but there is no dispute that it would definitely be bad for both the Earth and mankind as a whole if a major exchange of nuclear weapons took place.

Thanks @kronosposeidon. I watched the video and read the article, and that's some crazy shit. I live about 130 miles from the test site. Bing has a good satellite image of the it.

man, US really liked to nuke the west coast and USSR really hated that lake

>> ^redyellowblue:

Take away the 2nd and 3rd nuke and I'm gona guess the death toll was near nothing over all those years, because they were tests... in a desert.. or remote area.
If each of those nukes were aimed at a populated city containing stuff people care about and infrastructure. It would be "yabba dabba doo time"


actually death toll from the radioactive fallout around those test sites and in general all around the world is probably much higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
i know my grandfather died from radiation exposure complication after his battalion was deployed to an area near an atmospheric nuke test site. they weren't told why they were deployed there and govt continues to deny that they there were any experiments involving army personnel.

Tsar Bomba's fireball alone was five fucking miles in diameter, wouldve burned everything in a 62 mile radius to the third degree, and caused blast damage up to 620 miles away. In all that, the test bomb had half the yield of its original design (to reduce fallout)

so yes

it would be that bad

>> ^raverman:

If thousands of nukes over 50 years didnt cause the end of the world... would a nuclear war be as bad as they said?

>> ^notarobot:

I'd like to play tic tac toe please.
Looks more like a seriously tough game of Simon to me.

*fire

Adding video to channels (Fire) - requested by kronosposeidon.

>> ^redyellowblue:

Take away the 2nd and 3rd nuke and I'm gona guess the death toll was near nothing over all those years, because they were tests... in a desert.. or remote area.
If each of those nukes were aimed at a populated city containing stuff people care about and infrastructure. It would be "yabba dabba doo time"


Actually, after those pommy fuckers blew their filthy payloads over the desert of South Australia, they visited the nearby Aboriginal communities to see what effect the radiation had on them. It was a similar situation in the Pacific

They missed a possible blip off the coast of South Africa in 1979: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Safrica/Vela.html

Nice links! Would be interesting to see that fallout map correlated with cancer prevalence per capita....

>> ^alizarin:

1) They forgot Israel and South Africa in 1979... that would make it 2054.
2) This diagram is awesome.
Looks like the atmospheric vs underground count vs underwater counts are:
US 206/912/5
USSR 223/756/3
UK 21/24
France 50/160
China 22/26
India 0/6
South Africa/Isreal 1/0
Pakistan 0/7
North Korea 0/1
3) The fallout map is fun.
4) The Nevada and Kazakhstan need to surrender already

>> ^Stingray:
I only saw the count go to 2,053. I feel jipped.

Big bang.

Damn you mankind, you're scary!

I'm amazed there's anything left of south west america after having about 1,000 nukes detonated there.

That fallout map is awesome as a supplement to this. I grew up in Clark County (Las Vegas) - just a few hundred miles south of the test sites. I now live half way across the country in texas and there are more rads here than right next to the tests themselves.

I always remember hearing really bad things happened in southern utah with the tests but i didn't realize montana was hit so hard.

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I subbed a dupe... Here's a *quality to make up for it.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by LarsaruS.

Las Vegas, Nev. used the nuclear tests as a tourist attraction. They even had there own superhero, Miss Atomic Bomb.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Nov-18-Thu-2004/news/25269450.html

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