Isao Hashimoto’s Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Test, 1945–1998

Time lapse map of every nuclear explosion ever on Earth

Between July 1945 and May 1998, the world’s nuclear powers set off 2,053 nuclear explosions. Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto turned every one of them into a flash of light and a single musical note on a world map. His 2003 work, simply titled 1945–1998, compresses 53 years into roughly a quarter of an hour, and it remains one of the clearest ways to grasp the scale of the nuclear age.

The video is below. Watch it with the sound on: the beeps are part of the point.

Isao Hashimoto’s 1945–1998. Each flash is one nuclear explosion; the counters track every country’s running total.

How the map works

Hashimoto made each second of the video stand for one month. A calendar ticks along at the top of the screen, while counters for each country climb along the edges. When a weapon is detonated, a dot flashes at the test site and a tone sounds. Every nation has its own pitch, so as the decades pass the single beeps of the 1940s turn into an overlapping, almost musical clamour.

The design is deliberately quiet. There are no mushroom clouds, no narration and no dramatic soundtrack. That restraint is what makes it unsettling: by the time the counters pass the thousands, viewers are reacting to arithmetic alone.

The opening is slow. The first flash is the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, followed within weeks by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only nuclear weapons ever used in war. Then the map falls silent for years. If you are short of time, skip ahead to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the pace becomes overwhelming.

Who tested, and how many times

Official counts vary slightly by source, because some events involved several devices fired together and a few failed shots were never numbered. Hashimoto’s total of 2,053 sits close to the figures most reference works use:

United States: 1,054 tests, many of them at the Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific.
Soviet Union: 715 tests, mainly at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic.
France: 210 tests, first in the Algerian Sahara and later in French Polynesia.
United Kingdom: 45 tests, in Australia, the Pacific and, jointly with the US, in Nevada.
China: 45 tests at Lop Nur.
India: 6 underground explosions (one in 1974 and five in May 1998).
Pakistan: 6 underground explosions in May 1998, which close the video.

Two countries account for close to nine in ten of all tests. Watching the US and Soviet counters race each other is the clearest visual summary of the Cold War arms race you are likely to see.

Why testing surged, then went underground

The busiest stretch came in 1961 and 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union together detonated roughly 340 megatons in the atmosphere in two years. Radioactive fallout circling the globe peaked in 1963.

Public alarm over that fallout helped produce the Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed on 5 August 1963. It banned explosions in the atmosphere, underwater and in space, but still allowed them underground. In the video you can see the result: the testing continues, but most of it moves to underground shafts. France and China, which did not sign, carried on with atmospheric tests for years afterwards.

Across the whole period, reference figures put atmospheric explosions at around 520 and underground ones at around 1,350. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, opened for signature in 1996, bans every kind of nuclear explosion. It has still not formally entered into force, because several states whose ratification is required, including the United States and China, have signed but not ratified, while India, Pakistan and North Korea have not signed at all.

What the video leaves out

Hashimoto’s map ends in 1998, so it misses North Korea. Some early descriptions of the video called North Korea’s tests “alleged” and counted only two. In fact, international seismic monitoring detected six North Korean nuclear tests:

9 October 2006
May 2009
February 2013
January 2016, which Pyongyang announced as a hydrogen bomb test
September 2016
3 September 2017, by far the largest, with estimated yields in the hundreds of kilotons

Those six bring the global total to a little over 2,050 explosions by most counts. North Korea is the only country known to have conducted a nuclear test explosion this century.

The human cost behind the dots

Each flash on the map was a real event with real consequences for people living downwind. At its 1963 peak, global fallout added a dose equal to roughly 7% of average natural background radiation. A study by the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute estimated about 11,000 excess deaths, mostly from thyroid cancer linked to radioactive iodine. Wider estimates of worldwide deaths over the long term are much larger and much less certain.

Some individual tests went badly wrong. The American Castle Bravo shot at Bikini Atoll in 1954 yielded about 15 megatons, more than twice what its designers expected, and spread fallout over inhabited islands and a Japanese fishing boat. Communities near test sites in Kazakhstan, Australia, French Polynesia, the Marshall Islands and the American West have lived with the effects for generations.

Why it is still worth watching

Hashimoto, who released the work in 2003, said he wanted to show “the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” Critics have called the result eerie and quietly terrifying, and it has been widely used in classrooms and museums.

It works as a teaching tool because it lets viewers notice patterns for themselves: the long silence after 1945, the frenzy before 1963, the steady thump of underground tests through the 1970s and 1980s, and the abrupt stop in the early 1990s as the Cold War ended. A few questions make good discussion starters: