S&F! Glad to know that i live in the country that set off half of those nuclear explosions! xD

Most Nukes at test stage are exploded at half or quarter their yield, for example The Soviet Tsar Bomber was oridinally meant to be 100 Megtons but it was reduced to 50 when it was tested, the largest nuclear weapon ever exploded, Zone of total destruction of the Tsar Bomba radius 35 kilometres (22 mi), fireball radius 3.5 kilometres 2.2 mi. You are right the explosions are relatively small, but it's the shockwave and the fallout that will end everything. Nuclear tests are controlled, and after 1963 they weren't allowed to detonate in the atmosphere, so it isn't 2053 Nukes that have been detonated in the atmosphere, it's considerabley less. In a war situation if everyone fired their nukes who had them, it would be over 20,000 warheads of different yields, so yes I am frightened, as everyone else should be.

Anyone know haw many nuclear detonations have been carried out since 1998?

All I can say at the moment is " what a bunch of wankers". and that's being polite.
It's such a [snip] shame that we invest so much energy, technology, and money into trying to kill each other, when it's plainly obvious that the same, invested into trying to build 'bridges' would be so much more profitable for humanity, but not 'the man'.
What a shame.

What a [snipping] shame.

We are not worthy of anything other than the cold dark guarantee of death, if this is what we strive for.


Bastards.

interesting stuff. Never seen this.

...the Brits used them in Australia and the French in the Pacific..
..
.so they go hand in hand with the Yanks.

Never seen this before, it makes me sick and disgusted once more with the people in power. As some one else said what a sick waste of citizens money. If only they could dedicate research to something that "helps" instead of destroying" in the same manner. What a world we could live in. Very sad.

The tests sometimes went badly on both sides for Russia and the US.

Indigenous islanders were uprooted without recourse from the test site areas initially, and several tests greatly exceeded expected yields, creating intense and unexpected radiological disasters. Of these, the 15-megaton 1954 Bravo test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands was the worst, badly sickening test personnel, relocated islanders nearby, and the crew of a Japaneses fishing vessel 85 miles away from the blast. Repeated large-scale testing has also resulted in enduring radiological contamination of all the test islands, including Enewetak Atoll and Johnston and Christmas Islands. Bikini remains uninhabitable to this day.

At the end of WW2 the top German scientists were split up and moved to both US and Russia through operations like the US operation paperclip. Took them another 50 years to work off the WW2 tensions through cold war nuclear projects. The master plan as thought out in 1947 was of course to keep dangerous nuclear technology out of rogue military regimes. I'm sure much of the program is more along the lines of high visibility honey pots to attract aspiring young physicists that might work for the "wrong cause".