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The nuclear weapons tests of the United States were performed from 1945 to 1992 as part of the nuclear arms race. The United States conducted around 1,054 nuclear tests by official count, including 216 atmospheric, underwater, and space tests.
Aug 4, 2023 · The total number and yearly listing of U.S. nuclear test explosions listed in this fact sheet are based on the figures published in United States Nuclear Tests: July 1945 through September 1992 DOE/NV-209 (Rev. 14), December 1994. The Department of Energy has since pubished two revisions of the pubication that slightly revise these numbers and ...
Aug 29, 2023 · The United States has conducted just over half of all nuclear tests, with 1,030 tests between 1945 and 1992. The Soviet Union carried out the second highest number of nuclear tests at 715 tests...
Aug 6, 2001 · Between 16 July 1945 and 23 September 1992 the United States of America conducted (by official count) 1054 nuclear tests, and two nuclear attacks. The number of actualnuclear devices (aka "bombs") tested, and nuclear explosions is largerthan this, but harder to establish precisely.
- Overview
- ‘Now, I am become Death’
- ‘Who does this to their own people?’
- Vaporized islands and ‘jellyfish babies’
- Blasts on the Ring of Fire
- Nuclear fracking
- ‘Everyone’s wells went bad’
- What does the future hold?
The United States conducted 1,054 atomic tests—costing more than $100 billion and taking an incalculable toll on humans and the environment.
Witnesses observe the fireball at the Nevada Test Site from the 1953 U.S. nuclear test Grable. The 15-kiloton bomb had about the same explosive power as the device that decimated Hiroshima in 1945.
Potassium iodide pills are often given out during nuclear emergencies, actual or imminent. In late August, for example, the European Union pledged to preemptively donate more than five million anti-radiation tablets to Ukraine, amid fears of a Chernobyl-level catastrophe at the Russian-occupied, embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
But for Claudia Peterson, 67, and her peers growing up near Cedar City, Utah, iodide pills were part of their routine—like recess, or homework, or reciting the pledge of allegiance. The ones given to students at her elementary school were big and orange, she recalls.
Another part of the routine: the men in suits who showed up at the school toting Geiger counters. “They would come up to our faces and run this machine over us,” she says. When Peterson asked her teacher what a beeping response from the machine meant, she was told that the device had detected residual radiation from recent dental x-rays.
“Except,” Peterson says, “I had never had them.”
In the middle of the night on July 16, 1945, a caravan of buses, cars, and trucks carried about 90 scientists to the Alamogordo Bombing Range—a desert testing ground 125 miles southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Among them was William “Atomic Bill” Laurence, a New York Times reporter conscripted earlier that year as the in-house historian and propagandist of the Manhattan Project. Just before dawn, the team would attempt to detonate an atomic bomb for the first time.
As some from the group picnicked and passed around “sunburn lotion,” they fretted about whether the years and billions of dollars spent on the top-secret project would work. (Manhattan Project physicists had also deliberated—and placed bets—on whether the bomb might set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire but decided it would be unlikely.)
At 5:30 a.m., the team detonated a 21-kiloton plutonium implosion device nicknamed Gadget atop a hundred-foot tower. The blast—which packed an explosive payload equivalent of about 21,000 tons of TNT—dredged up and irradiated hundreds of tons of soil and sent a mushroom cloud up to 70,000 feet high. For Laurence, the explosion was unlike anything ever seen on the planet: It had the “light of many super-suns” and was “devastating, full of great promise and great forebodings,” he wrote. For physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, it brought to mind Hindu scripture: “Now, I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” Everyone there knew, he said later, that “the world would not be the same.”
Some residents of the surrounding areas thought they were witnessing the end of the world. The flash was so bright that a blind girl a hundred miles away saw it, according to one local press report. Within hours, an odd, snow-like ash blanketed the nearby countryside. Fallout was detected as far away as New York State.
None of those living near the Trinity site were warned or evacuated before or after the blast. It had been selected in part for its supposed remoteness from human settlement, but census data from 1940 show that nearly half a million people in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico lived within 150 miles of ground zero. (Privately acknowledging the “very serious hazard” posed by the blast, the Manhattan Project’s chief medical officer advised that future tests should likely only be conducted where no one lived within a 150-mile radius.) To calm nerves, officials told people that a nearby ammunition dump had exploded. Many learned the truth about the blast only years later, and Trinity test survivors are not among the downwinders eligible for government compensation.
Upon learning of the first successful American nuclear test, the Soviet Union accelerated efforts to develop their own bomb. The Soviets successfully tested their first device in 1949, ending the U.S.’s nuclear monopoly and setting off an international nuclear arms race.
On January 11, 1951, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission distributed a handbill to residents of towns and farming communities in southern Nevada and Utah, announcing that it would soon start testing nuclear bombs nearby. Tests would go on indefinitely at what would become known as the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, but there would be no danger to people beyond the perimeter, it said.
Sixteen days later, a B-50 bomber dropped Able, a one-kiloton bomb, over the test site—the first of a hundred aboveground bombs detonated there during the next decade.
For nearby residents, the blasts became a regular occurrence and even, at first, a form of entertainment. And soon, Americans across the country could occasionally experience the bombs voyeuristically on national television, including the 1953 Annie test, whose 16-kiloton blast dramatically incinerated a mock neighborhood dubbed Doom Town, complete with cars and suburban homes filled with furniture and mannequins arranged in various activities.
Officials assured those living around the site that the detonations were “relatively small in explosive power,” but some blasts were enormous: Hood was a 74-kiloton bomb exploded in 1957 as part of a larger military exercise in a nearby field involving 2,200 U.S. Marines. In 1962, the 104-kiloton Sedan test—seven times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb—displaced more than 12 million tons of earth and left a hole 1,280 feet wide and 320 feet deep. It has the distinction of being the largest manmade crater in the U.S., and the Nevada Test Site’s Yucca Flat testing region remains the most cratered landscape on the planet, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Tests were conducted on days when winds were projected to blow fallout clouds to the east and northeast—away from Las Vegas, which enjoyed a financial boom from the new nuclear enterprise. Opportunistic business owners turned the detonations into Vegas attractions: Bars concocted atomic-themed cocktails, casinos hosted “dawn parties” at which guests could watch the explosions.
Left: For the 1953 Annie test, officials built a mock town—complete with homes, cars, and mannequins arranged in everyday activities—to see how they would withstand the blast.
Tests of the U.S.’s biggest thermonuclear bombs—hugely powerful weapons also known as hydrogen bombs or H-bombs—were reserved for the Pacific Proving Grounds, located largely in the Marshall Islands, some 2,400 miles west of Hawaii. The first U.S. H-bomb—codenamed Ivy Mike, with an explosive payload of 10.4 megatons, nearly 700 times that of the Hiroshima bomb—was detonated in 1952. It vaporized the small island of Elugelab, leaving a crater more than a mile long and 164 feet deep.
Then came Castle Bravo, in 1954, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. A bomb that size detonated over New York City would cause up to five million deaths and create a fireball nearly two miles wide, according to NukeMap. (In 1961, the Soviets detonated their largest thermonuclear weapon, the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, which had “roughly 10 times the total explosive power unleashed in all of World War II, including both the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” according to nuclear expert Sara Kutchesfahani.)
“These multimegaton weapons [were] very dirty in terms of their fallout content,” Wellerstein says. Clouds from Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo were closely monitored, he adds, “and they went around the entire world over the course of a week or so.” Contamination spread over roughly 7,000 square miles—“the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history,” according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Fallout landed most heavily on surrounding atolls to the east and southeast of Bikini. Marshallese on Bikini and Enewetak atolls had been relocated before the tests, some to Rongelap Atoll 160 miles away from Bikini. Lijon Eknilang, then an eight-year-old living on Rongelap, witnessed Castle Bravo and in a 2003 testimony recalled the blinding flash and swaying ground. “We were very afraid because we didn’t know what it was,” she said. “The elders said another world war had begun.”
Soon came the telltale cloud, and an hours-long flurry of radioactive debris blanketed Rongelap. Water in containment drums began to change color, “but we drank it anyway, Eknilang said. Then radiation sickness set in: People began vomiting, blistering, and losing hair. Two days later, the U.S. military evacuated 64 Marshallese from Rongelap to a U.S. base on Kwajalein Atoll for medical treatment.
They were allowed to return to Rongelap in 1957 “under continuing radiological surveillance,” according to a 1994 report National Research Council Committee on Radiological Safety in the Marshall Islands. “Later … unanticipated medical problems began to surface,” the report went on.
Amchitka Island—near the western end of the Aleutian Island chain, about 1,300 miles west-southwest of Anchorage—sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. This 25,000-mile tectonically active zone along the periphery of the Pacific Ocean is the site of 90 percent of earthquakes and the most violent seismic events recorded on Earth. During the 1960s and early 70s, the U.S. carried out three massive underground tests there. The first, Long Shot, in 1965, was more than five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. The second, Milrow, in 1969, packed more than 10 times the power of Long Shot.
Next came five-megaton Cannikin, a thermonuclear device with an explosive payload 333 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb that spurred anger and controversy ahead of its scheduled 1971 detonation. Opponents feared that its subterranean explosion might trigger a major earthquake and calamitous tsunami. Protesters rallied in front of the White House; more than 30 senators called on then President Richard Nixon to halt the test; the Japanese government objected for fear of a tsunami.
“The risks are so great, the gains so dubious, and the debits already so real that the entire experiment appears to be a ghastly and unnecessary mistake,” a New York Times editorial declared.
Atomic Energy Commission officials downplayed the dangers but acknowledged privately that “the worst conceivable effects of Cannikin … cannot be ruled out.” A coalition of environmental groups launched a Hail Mary legal challenge to the test that went up to the Supreme Court. Convening on a day’s notice for a rare Saturday morning session, the court denied the injunction.
Cannikin—the largest-ever U.S. underground detonation—took place on November 6, 1971, heaving the surrounding earth up some 20 feet and creating a shock equivalent to a 7.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. No seismic disaster followed, but Cannikin was seen as a turning point, igniting citizen outrage over “unchecked freedom with which [atomic] weapons are commissioned, tested, and deployed,” as Time magazine put it at the time.
Radioactive material remains sealed in the test cavities “because no practicable technology exists to remove [it],” according to the Department of Energy, whose Office of Legacy Management continues to monitor seismic activity that might affect the site.
Not all U.S. nuclear detonations were weapons tests; some were intended to find out if nuclear energy and atomic blasts had industrial applications. Gnome, an underground test in 1961 near Carlsbad, New Mexico, was held to determine whether nuclear-blast energy could be converted into electricity. Six years later came Gasbuggy, near Farmington, New Mexico, to explore whether underground atomic detonations could stimulate release of subterranean natural gas. Gasbuggy did release gas, but it was irradiated in the explosion, making it commercially unusable.
Left: One of the three 33-kiloton Rio Blanco nuclear devices is prepared for detonation. The test was part of a series of nuclear fracking experiments conducted in several locations across the U.S.
Photograph via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty
Right: Protesters demonstrate outside the Colorado governor’s mansion against the scheduled Project Rio Blanco nuclear test. It went ahead anyway. In 1974, Coloradans approved a state constitutional amendment requiring voter agreement before any future atomic detonation in their state.
Photograph by Duane Howell, The Denver Post/Getty
Despite this discouraging result, in 1969, the U.S. conducted another nuclear fracking test, near Parachute, Colorado. As with Gasbuggy, radioactivity from the 40-kiloton Rulison explosion contaminated the gas it released, rendering it useless. The next scheduled underground test in Colorado prompted protests and a class action lawsuit filed by a coalition of environmental groups. Yet on May 17, 1973, the Rio Blanco test went ahead anyway, with three simultaneous underground detonations near Meeker. This trio of blasts—also a “natural gas reservoir stimulation” experiment—had a combined explosive payload of 99 kilotons, nearly seven times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
After the 1963 moratorium on aboveground nuclear tests, officials began to anticipate the possibility that underground tests also might be banned someday. To determine whether other nuclear powers might be able to carry out covert underground tests, the U.S. started conducting subterranean tests to figure out whether seismic equipment could detect faraway nuclear blasts below ground.
A subterranean salt dome near Purvis, Mississippi, about 20 miles southwest of Hattiesburg, made an ideal test location—an underground structure that might effectively muffle the sound of an atomic explosion.
Left: Family members outside their home near the site of Salmon, an underground nuclear test in 1964 outside Purvis, Mississippi. The blast “actually moved our chimney about six inches away from the house and caved in the water well,” one of them said. Hundreds of area residents filed property damage claims with the government.
Right: Horace Burge inspects damage to his house, about two miles from Salmon. Nearby residents were evacuated ahead of the blast and compensated $10 per adult and $5 per child for the inconvenience.
Photographs via PMAF Collection, Alamy
On October 22, 1964, the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Defense detonated a 5.3-kiloton device dubbed Salmon 2,710 feet down inside the dome. Nearby residents had been evacuated and compensated $10 per adult and $5 per child for the inconvenience. Salmon’s explosion registered 6.0 on the Richter scale and was detected as far away as Sweden; its shockwave lifted the ground four inches and blasted a cavity deep inside the salt dome. Two years later, a smaller nuclear device, Sterling, was detonated in that same space—and this time, the cavity created by the previous blast muffled the explosion, proving that nuclear powers indeed could try to hide tests by detonating atomic devices inside similar underground caverns.
Since 1992, the nine nuclear nations largely have honored the testing moratorium. (North Korea remains the exception, having conducted six tests since 2006; India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons in 1998.) To date, 186 nations have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibiting any nuclear detonations. The U.S. has not yet ratified it; Russia ratified it in 2000.
The entire U.S. nuclear stockpile is reviewed annually, mainly through “subcritical” tests—blasts that don’t produce a nuclear chain reaction but still test weapon components—and computer simulations. The Stockpile Stewardship Program “has done an amazingly good job,” says Robert Rosner, former chief scientist and director of the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
Yet the possibility that some part of the current testing program might fail, or that a future U.S. administration might resume full-blast testing for political or military reasons, triggers anxiety in testing-era downwinder communities.
“When they talk about reinvigorating the testing program, I want to know: Who is going to accept that in their backyards?” says Tina Cordova, a downwinder activist, cancer survivor, and fifth-generation resident of Tularosa, New Mexico, about 40 miles from the Trinity test site. Generations of her family have now suffered from testing-related cancers and health problems, she says.
“No test is void of risk and danger, and somebody is going to suffer the consequences of that,” she adds. “I just ask: Are you willing to stake your future on that, and the future of your family?”
Lesley M. M. Blume is a journalist, historian, and a New York Times bestselling author, most recently of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. This is her third story for National Geographic on the history and legacy of nuclear weapons .
The United States conducted 1,032 tests between 1945 and 1992. The Soviet Union carried out 715 tests between 1949 and 1990. The United Kingdom carried out 45 tests between 1952 and 1991. France...
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The United States conducted around 1,054 nuclear tests (by official count) between 1945 and 1992, including 216 atmospheric, underwater, and space tests. Some significant tests conducted by the United States include: Shot "Baker" of Operation Crossroads (1946) was the first underwater nuclear explosion.
