We Exploded Thousands of Nuclear Bombs

Super fact 48 : Since 1945 we have set off more than 2,000 Nuclear Bombs corresponding to a yield of an estimated 42,000 times that of the Hiroshima Bomb.

According to the Arms Control Association there’s been 2,056 nuclear bomb tests. According to the UN there’s been more than 2,000 nuclear bomb tests, and according to Wikipedia there’s been 2,121 nuclear bomb tests, totaling 635 Megaton. Using the typical yield estimate for the Hiroshima bomb of 15 Kiloton that corresponds to more than 42,000 Hiroshima bombs. I think most of us know about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and we know about nuclear testing. However, I think the number of tests and the large total yield will come as a surprise to many, at least it was a surprise to me. That is why I consider this a super fact.

Atomic bomb explosion in a city - nuclear attack on a crowded city – 3D rendering of a mushroom cloud encompassing a city with skyscrapers | We Exploded Thousands of Nuclear Bombs
Nuclear bomb dropped on a big city. Shutterstock, asset id: 2188083835 by CI Photos.

Nuclear Landscaping

It may also come as a surprise that many of these tests were not for military purposes. Another usage for nuclear bombs is nuclear landscaping. Towards the end of the 1950’s the existing Panama Canal was thought to be insufficiently large and some people, including Edward Teller, the father of the Hydrogen bomb (Thermonuclear bomb), suggested that a new wider and deeper canal could be built simply by using nuclear bombs to blow multiple huge holes across Panama. The US was also interested in creating a new harbor in Alaska using nuclear bombs.

Thus, Project Plowshare was created to achieve this. As part of the Project Plowshare 35 nuclear warheads were detonated. The Soviet Union also had a similar program named “Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy” that included 124 nuclear bomb tests. Due to concerns over radioactive fallout the nuclear landscaping projects were eventually put to rest. The last Plowshare detonation was on May 17, 1973. The book Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey recounts the history of nuclear testing and nuclear landscaping in greater detail.

An enormous nuclear bomb explosion in the dessert featuring a huge mushroom cloud.
Hydrogen bomb test by Alones Shutterstock Asset id: 2194195335.

Project Orion

Another non-military use of nuclear bomb testing was Project Orion. Project Orion was a study conducted from 1956 to 1964 by the US Air Force, NASA, and DARPA into the viability of a nuclear pulse spaceship that would be directly propelled by a series of atomic explosions behind the craft. A thick steel pusher plate would catch the blast and accelerate the ship forward.

The “Pascal B” shot in Operation Plumb Bob in 1957 was the first nuclear weapons test of the pusher concept. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 made it difficult to continue with the project. According to the book Atomic Awakening, if the design had been successfully completed, we could have created an interstellar spaceship that could have taken a crew and a large load to other planets and stars.

I can add that According to Atomic Awakening, in addition to Nuclear Landscaping and Project Orion, Nuclear Blasts were a tourist attraction.

Number of Nuclear Tests by Country

Below is a list of countries and the number of nuclear tests that they’ve performed according to the Arms Control Association and Wikipedia.

  • The United States – 1,030 – According to Wikipedia – 1,032
  • The USSR/Russia – 715 – According to Wikipedia – 727
  • France – 210 – According to Wikipedia – 215
  • United Kingdom – 45 – According to Wikipedia – 88
  • China – 45 – According to Wikipedia – 47
  • North Korea – 6 – According to Wikipedia – 6
  • India – 3 – According to Wikipedia – 3
  • Pakistan – 2- According to Wikipedia – 2

However, it should be noted that partially due to nuclear arms control legislation such as; the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT): Signed in 1963,  the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT): Signed in 1974, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) opened for signing in 1996, the number of nuclear tests have been significantly reduced. This is illustrated by the graph below from Our World in Data. The last nuclear test was done by North Korea in 2017.

The histogram graph shows how many nuclear tests took place each year since 1945. The different countries, the portion by each country, the US, USSR/Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, North Korean, India, and Pakistan are colored differently. The histogram shows the 1961 was the year when most nuclear tests took place. The vast majority of the tests took place between 1950 and 1990 | We Exploded Thousands of Nuclear Bombs
Data Source: Arms Control Association (2024). OurWorldInData.org/nuclear weapons.

Tsar Bomba

The biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded was RDS-220, or AN602, or Tsar Bomba. It was detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30th, 1961, on the arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, and yielded more than 50 Megaton. In other words, it was 3,300 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. According to Atomic Awakening, windows in Finland 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) away shattered. There are no cities large enough to match the size of the explosion. This is the kind of bomb that could obliterate states or small countries.

Tsar Bomba was a so-called thermonuclear device, or a hydrogen bomb as they are typically called. Hydrogen bombs are much more powerful than fission bombs, such as Uranium bombs or Plutonium bombs. To read my related post called “Ukraine Gave up Thousands of Nuclear Warheads” click here.

Russian Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud rising high above the clouds. High quality photo realist ( 3d make ) | We Exploded Thousands of Nuclear Bombs
This is an illustration of the Tsar Bomba explosion by by mbafai Shutterstock Asset id: 2208486661. To see a photo of the actual Tsar Bomba explosion click here (it is copyrighted).

Would you pay to watch a Nuclear Bomb Test? (Nuclear Bomb Test Tourism)

To see the other Super Facts click here

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Author: thomasstigwikman

My name is Thomas Wikman. I am a software/robotics engineer with a background in physics. I am currently retired. I took early retirement. I am a dog lover, and especially a Leonberger lover, a home brewer, craft beer enthusiast, I’m learning French, and I am an avid reader. I live in Dallas, Texas, but I am originally from Sweden. I am married to Claudia, and we have three children. I have two blogs. The first feature the crazy adventures of our Leonberger Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle as well as information on Leonbergers. The second blog, superfactful, feature information and facts I think are very interesting. With this blog I would like to create a list of facts that are accepted as true among the experts of the field and yet disputed amongst the public or highly surprising. These facts are special and in lieu of a better word I call them super-facts.

52 thoughts on “We Exploded Thousands of Nuclear Bombs”

    1. Yes, I read about the nuclear test tourism in the Atomic Awakening and I thought it was pretty weird too. It is hard to believe people participated in that but that’s what the book said (it is not a super fact so I did not verify the accuracy very closely).

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    1. Thank you Jacqui. If you had asked me one year ago how many nuclear tests there’s been I would have guessed maybe 20. However, scientific reports and magazines, government organisations US and International including the UN, organisations researching statistics such as Our World in Data, and encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Brittanica all state that it is in the low 2,000. That is a lot, but we haven’t had many lately.

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    1. Yes that is a very good thought. That is a lot of radiation and the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, spread only a tiny bit of radiation compared to the nuclear testing we did. However, that radiation was still much less than the radon in our basements assuming you consider the total radiation effecting people worldwide.

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  5. I think lots of these testings were kept from the public, with good reason.. Those facts make your hair stand on end… and no I would not like to be anywhere near any kind of testing, as those military who were forced to witness found out in later years via their health.. Thank you for your detailed post Thomas..

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    1. Thank you so much Sue. Yes some of the testings were secret and some were official. Certainly the first one in New Mexico 1945 was secret. However, after 1950 it became increasingly difficult to hide nuclear bomb explosions due to the development of sophisticated detection technologies. But there might be some we don’t know about. You are right witnessing these tests were not good for your health, something that wasn’t entirely realized until the 1960’s. A lot of people were unknowingly exposed to too much radiation, and it also spread around the world.

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      1. Agreed Thomas, Here in the UK too they did testing on chemicals to see how far the wind would blow them.. Not telling people… Years later these places had huge cancer clusters, it all came out eventually… We are often used as Guinea pigs unfortunately xx

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          1. YES, 👍 that’s the one Thomas, thank you for researching it.

            After reading it, it shows too what the freedom of information can help reveal.

            And I knew it was down south of our country from where I live in the East Midlands. 😊

            Many thanks for taking time to find it. Xx I appreciate you did x

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    1. I have to admit I has to look up “antiestablishmentarianism”. I live through the ending part of the cold war, 1970’s and 1980’s. When I was a highschool student I was part of a group who tried to smuggle literature and printing press equipment into the Soviet Union (1980). We were caught at the Finland station in Leningrad and interrogated at gun point, but they let us in and gave a guide from the KGB who was spying on us but she was also a very helpful guide at the same time.

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  7. Java Bean: “Ayyy, that sounds like a lot of bombs!”
    Charlee: “Our Dada says that back when he used to run a superhero role-playing game group, he used the nuclear testing to explain the presence of mutants in the world. Sounds reasonable, I guess.”
    Chaplin: “The part where the mutants are able to fly and teleport and shoot laser beams, maybe less so …”

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  8. That’s a lot of testing. Very interesting, too. The only thing I remember hearing about any of it was when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s we were warned not to eat any snow, because it might be radioactive or something. 🙂

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  9. Thanks for the fascinating post. I was especially interested in what you wrote about Project Orion. I remember Carl Sagan mentioned it briefly in his Cosmos television show, but didn’t know the project lasted as long as it did.

    The university I attended is not far from the Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was tested. The site is now part of the larger White Sands Missile Range complex. While I was there, circa 1987, they conducted a test where, as I recall, they set off 15 kilotons of TNT. The goal was to do a careful analysis of how much earth was displaced as check on computer models of what a so-called “nuclear winter” might be like. The explosion was about 30 miles from our university and I felt a distinct jolt. My now-wife was in the university library at the time and remembers the doors blowing open from the shockwave. It was a very eye-opening experience. I did look to see if I could find anything written up about this test and check my memory of the numbers, but I wasn’t able to find anything.

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    1. Thank you Dave. That is an interesting story. As I understand there was a test using 15 Kiloton of TNT, not an atomic bomb but just TNT. That is impressive. You could feel the jolt 30 miles away but at least you escaped radiation (I think).

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      1. Yes, it was literally just 15 kilotons of TNT. There shouldn’t have been any radiation, unless it scattered some residual radiation from the soil itself given that it was set off near the Trinity site but I believe they endeavored to be far enough away from the site that it wouldn’t upset any radioactive soil.

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  14. Thank you Kerri. Yes that’s what I try to do with this blog. Surprise people, including myself, with facts that are important big news and yet hard to believe as well as verifiably true (using multiple reliable sources).

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  16. This is scary stuff to me, Thomas, but so much information that I didn’t know! I had no idea that so many nuclear bombs have been detonated. Think of all the money that could have funded schools or medical research or food production instead of dispersing poisons into the air. Sigh. That Tsar Bomba is especially terrifying. Thanks for the superfact!

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    1. Thank you so much Diane. I knew about the nuclear tests, and about Tsar Bomba, but I did not know either that there were so many, well until recently. However, all the agencies and science magazins, and wikipedia, are all reporting roughly the same high scary numbers.

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