How many nuclear bombs have gone off in the world?
If you'd asked me up until recently I'd have said two. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oh, wait, there was the test bomb in the USA, then all the fuss about Bikini Atholl where the French tested a bomb and then the British tests in Australia, so maybe ten, or a few more?
Two nuclear bombs were used in war. Two. How many were tested?
This animation shows, in the top right, the month and year. Around the edges are country flags with the number of bombs exploded. Flashes show where they went off. In the bottom right is the total of nuclear bombs. Not explosions. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc are not counted. Only deliberate bombs.
By 1998, thirteen years ago, before the Korean tests, more than two thousand nuclear bombs had been detonated on planet Earth. If you are worried about fallout from the Japanese quake-damaged reactor, forget it. That won't even blip on your background radiation now.
The Japanese have never developed a nuclear bomb. For a good reason. They have seen what it can do.
Two bombs on Japan. Two thousand on the planet. I think that should just about cover it.
Cancer rates started booming in the fifties. Officially, there is no connection.
Edit Damn this widescreen fad. The video edge is clipped. It's best to double-click it and watch on YouTube.
3 comments:
Terrifying...
It's astounding, isn't it? Over two thousand nuclear bombs up to 1998 and that's thirteen years ago. North Korea's tests are not included.
To think, we hear about traces of radioactive iodine in the UK from the Japanese reactor and everyone is terrified. Radioactive iodine has a half-life of eight days, so in a few weeks it's nothing to worry about at all because it's almost disappeared and even the levels we find now aren't deadly.
Yet two thousand nuclear bombs doesn't make the news.
There has been a surge in cancer rates since the fifties. It's all blamed on smoking. Smoking has declined from almost 90% of the population to about 20% in that time but cancer is still increasing.
I know smoking is not good for anyone but really, causation and correlation simply do not work at all here.
Link cancer with nuclear tests, and maybe it does.
Someday, someone will be starting our world all over again. I hope they do a better job than we have done.
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