Oooh who's winning?

[Lineareagle]

[Selden]

Good god, no wonder we were so paranoid growing up in the 1950's and 1960's. I had no idea there had been so many nuclear tests.

[FlyingFinn]

That's quite disturbing.

 

Good to keep in mind though that it does include both atmospheric and underground detonations. I guess the underground tests aren't so bad

 

--

Mikko

 

[Kathy R]

You have to wonder what this has meant to the health of all living things?

[Ken H.]

Oooh who's winning?

No one.

[yabadabapal]

Wow. If it were spread out time wise, that equals about one nuclear blast every 7 days for the last 45 years. So if you were to take the average radiation from a nuclear blast over 45 years and multiply it by 2053 times being the quantity of blasts, and then compare it to the average radiation the earth is exposed to from the sun for a 45 year time period, what would the comparative figures look like.

[Glenn Reed]

Oooh who's winning?

No one.

 

[chrisd]

16 years ago today it was Deep Blue over Garry Kasparov. The first computer program to defeat a world champion in a game under tournament regulations.

[ESokoloff]

So what (in the World) was going on between December 1958 & August 1961?

France was the only on setting off fireworks.

 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US testing falls off dramatically.

 

Was/is the primary objective for these tests chest thumping?

[Asymmetrical]

I can't cite the reference, but I remember reading that since the introduction of nuclear weapons, casualties from war have dramatically declined - relatively speaking. This is apparently the result of avoidance of all-out war and the consequent deaths in mass-scale wars (such as WWI and WWII) for fear that nuclear weapons would be used. So at least in the short run, nukes have been a deterrent to war, not a cause of it.

 

This has borne out the theory of "mutually assured destruction" which has prevented the use of nukes. However, that deterrence will be lost if nukes are acquired by people who are motivated more by martyrdom in the name of a cause than life.

 

 

[Mike]

My first USAF assignment was in the Strategic Air Command. It was a "no-kidding, my finger's on the trigger" world in those days, with that trigger directly connected to weapons of unfathomable destructive power. I am quite sure I never knew the half of it, but there were occasions on which we clearly moved a tick or two toward pulling that trigger.

 

It was an odd experience--on one hand, it was incredibly disciplined, with zero tolerance for the slightest screwup. On the other hand, we navigated around these animals--bombs and missiles with the capacity to kill hundreds of millions--with the same familiarity you might accord any piece of machinery that's constantly in your sight. I never went a night without nightmares...never. They stopped when I moved on to another assignment.