The bomb fell more than twice
Philip Kerr's novel The Second Angel opens on a thought: the bomb fell in 1945, and everything that came after was fallout. The usual story says it fell twice, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then stopped.
It did not stop. The record counts 2,057 nuclear detonations since the Trinity test on 16 July 1945. Two were dropped on cities. All the others were called tests: in the Nevada desert, on the atolls of the Pacific, over Kazakhstan, under the Sahara, in Siberia, on Lop Nur, at Mururoa.
Where is the difference?
A test and a live bomb differ in intent, in who stood where, and in what the announcement said. They do not differ in the physics. The fireball, the crater or the cavity, the isotopes in the air and the water: the same. Many of the people downwind of a test were never asked.
Falloutr takes that seriously and counts them all as what they were: detonations. On the map and the globe a dot is a dot: the two used in war look like the rest, because the rest vastly outnumbers them.
What you can do here
- See how far the nearest detonation is from any place, split into the nearest used in war and the nearest called a test.
- Replay 1945 to 2017 and watch the record accumulate. With the sound armed, each detonation is one click.
- See the ambient gamma radiation reported by the nearest live public sensor, when there is one.
The data, and its limits
- Detonations 1945 to 1998: the SIPRI and Swedish Defence Research Establishment report Nuclear Explosions 1945–1998 (Bergkvist and Ferm, 2000), in the structured form published by data-is-plural (MIT licence for the code and extraction). Yields are the upper estimate in kilotons; many are unknown or zero and shown as not recorded. Simultaneous detonations (salvos) are counted as one event in this source, so some counts are lower than other tallies.
- North Korea, 2006 to 2017: six tests added by hand at the Punggye-ri site. The coordinates are the site, not per-event seismic locations, and no yield is shown.
- Not included: subcritical experiments, which do not sustain a chain reaction, and disputed events such as the 1979 Vela incident.
- Distance is the straight surface distance to the recorded site. It says nothing about fallout, wind, dose or health risk. This is an awareness tool, not safety advice.
- Ambient radiation comes from Safecast (open data, CC0), a volunteer network with very uneven coverage. The page reads a snapshot refreshed on a schedule, not a live feed, and shows the age. Counts per minute are converted to µSv/h with a typical factor for the tube type, so values are approximate. If no sensor is within 100 km, no reading is shown.
- The sound: with a sensor in range, the click rate is that sensor's real count rate. Without one it is a steady reference tick, marked as illustrative. While the timeline plays, each detonation passed is one click.
Privacy
Your location is used in your browser and is not sent to this site. If you type a place name, the text is sent to the OpenStreetMap Nominatim search service to find its coordinates. A shared link carries your location rounded to about 10 km. There are no cookies and no analytics.
Credits
Detonation data: SIPRI/FOI, data-is-plural. Radiation data: Safecast. Coastlines: Natural Earth (public domain) via world-atlas. Idea: Philip Kerr's The Second Angel.