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Thursday, August 05, 2010

1945-1998: 53 Years, 2053 Nuclear detonations, 14 minutes

Came across an interesting work of animation prepared by a Japanese named Isao Hashimoto. Starting from the first Nuclear test detonation in 1945 at New Mexico by the Americans, it animates all the 2053 confirmed Nuclear test explosions till 1998, that culminates with India's Shakti-series of tests [that was preceded by the Smiling Buddha] and Pakistan's copycat Chagan-Chaman-whatever-it-is-they-called-theirs test. Since this animation was prepared in 2003, North Korea's 2 Nuclear tests remain undocumented here.

Set to a scale of 1 second denoting 1 month, & mapping the test locations on a map of the world, it gives us a sense of perspective of the mindset & prevailing threat perceptions during the Cold War era. Built primarily as a weapon of deterrence [thanks to MAD] & make policy statements*, one can see the mind-boggling frequency with which the power centers of the time tested their devices at the height of the Cold War - the animation goes bezerk with the light & sound display of Nuclear explosions during that period depicted.

Duration: 14 minutes 24 seconds

URL: http://blip.tv/file/1662914

The video denotes only those Nuclear explosions that were backed by confirmatory data, the data having been sourced from the compendium Nuclear Explosions 1945-1998 published by the respected Stockholm-based organization SIPRI. Thus India is shown to have conducted a total 4 Nuclear tests, while Pakistan 2 and the Vela incident finds no mention.

* except in case of a certain nation that has been termed an "International migraine", who uses it to threaten the world with suicide

Godspeed

Possibly related posts:

Establishing a sustainable model for Electrically operated transports

The boy who built his own Nuclear Reactor

Russian Surface to Air Missile (SAM) Simulators

The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes