Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).
Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.
Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.
2 comments:
really interesting. I was aware of which nations were considered "nuclear" but watching that you get a sense of when each country entered the scene and where they conducted their testing. France surprised me, I was trying to figure out the south pacific site they were experimenting from.
Chilling really.
I'm not particularly anti-nuke, but it certainly was short-sided to explode so many in the atmosphere. I'd like to see the numbers of cancer rates during that time.
Martin Sheen, along with his son Emilio Estevez, starred in a TV movie about nuclear testing called Nightbreaker. I don't believe everything I read and esp. don't take the plot of movies as fact, but Nightbreaker was about the documented and proven exposure the troops were subjected to during some of those early tests.
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