From 1945 to 1963 the U.S.A. conducted an extensive campaign of atmospheric nuclear tests, grouped into roughly 20 test "series." After 1963 when the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed testing for the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain moved underground. France continued atmospheric testing until 1974 and China did so until 1980. This page focuses mainly on U.S. testing because those documents are most readily available.
Summary Table of U.S. Nuclear Test Series
This table shows the year, location, number of detonations, and approximate number of
personnel for each of the twenty named atmospheric nuclear test series.
U.S. Nuclear Testing from Project TRINITY to the PLOWSHARE
Program
This document gives a historical overview of the U.S. atmospheric nuclear testing
program. It lists every detonation by name and summarizes the radiation exposures of test
participants. Also available as Adobe Acrobat PDF [592Kb].
Map
of. Nuclear Test Sites Worldwide
This map shows the name, approximate location, and years tests were conducted for each
site of atmospheric nuclear tests through 1963.
Note: These video clips were digitized from the best available copies of U.S. Government films. For additional information about these films, see the Historical Nuclear Test Films page at the DOE Nevada Test Site.
Crossroads
ABLE Test [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 1.9 MB]
The ABLE test in 1946 was an air drop of the same Fatman-type weapon dropped on Nagasaki.
Crossroads
BAKER Test [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 2.1 MB]
The BAKER test in 1946 was a Fatman-type weapon detonated 96 feet below the surface of the
ocean.
Buster-Jangle Test [160x120
Quicktime MOV, 3.3 MB]
This video clip shows one of the test detonations from the Buster-Jangle series in Nevada.
The narrator describes the visible characteristics of a nuclear detonation.
Tumbler-Snapper
DOG [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 2.9 MB]
Tumbler-Snapper DOG was a 20 kiloton airdrop detonated on May 1, 1952. Army and
Marine troops participated in four of the eight Tumber-Snapper shots, as shown in the two
video clips below.
Desert
Rock IV [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 1.9 MB]
Marine troops observed DOG shots at Tumbler-Snapper from trenches just 7,000 yards
from ground zero.
Desert
Rock IV [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 1.4 MB]
This video shows the blast wave crossing the desert and hitting the troop trenches.
Ivy MIKE, slow-motion closeup of fireball [160x120
Quicktime MOV, 900 KB]
The Ivy MIKE shot was the first U.S. thermonuclear test using the Teller-Ulam
radiation-implosion principle. It used liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel and yielded
10.7 megatons. The fireball reached a diameter of 3.5 miles.
Ivy MIKE, distant fireball and cloud [160x120
Quicktime MOV, 1.9 MB]
This clip shows a real-time view of MIKE from a safe distance.
Ivy
MIKE, later cloud stage [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 1.1 MB]
The MIKE cloud eventually rose to a height of 20 miles (into the stratosphere) and
spread out to a width of 100 miles.
Ivy KING
detonation [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 3.1 MB]
Ivy KING was an air-drop of the "Super-Oralloy" all-fission bomb, with
a yield of 500 kilotons.
Castle BRAVO test
[160x120 Quicktime MOV, 2.7 MB]
The Castle BRAVO test on March 1, 1954, yielded 15 megatons, the largest nuclear weapon
ever detonated by the United States. By accident the inhabited atolls of Rongelap,
Rongerik and Utirik were contaminated with fallout, as was the Japanese fishing trawler Fukuryu Maru
or Lucky Dragon. The controversy over fallout that simmered around the Nevada Test
Site erupted into international alarm.
Castle
ROMEO test [160x120 Quicktime MOV, 2.1 MB]
The Castle ROMEO test yielded 11 megatons. It was detonated from a barge in the
BRAVO crater.
Gallery of Nuclear Test Photos [Mirror--Original
server has gone off-line indefinitely.]
This site has a large number of atmospheric nuclear detonation photos as GIF images.
Nevada Test Site Historical Photos and
Films
This site has a large number of photos and some video clips showing atmospheric
detonations. There is also information on how to order VHS videos of recently declassified
DOE nuclear test films.
Chart of Global Nuclear
Weapons tests, 1945-1996
This year-by-year chart of the number of nuclear weapons tests is one example of the
information available at the Brookings Institution's U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost
Study Project.
Table of Known Nuclear Tests
Worldwide: 1945-1996
This table breaks down the number of worldwide nuclear tests by country, year, and
whether it was atmospheric or underground. There is a wealth of information, particularly
about nuclear weapons stockpiles, at the home page for the Natural Resources Defense
Council's (NRDC) Nuclear Weapons
Program.
Nuclear Test Personnel Review
This page at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency
describes the study that was done to catalog radiation exposure to participants in U.S.
atmospheric nuclear tests.
Copyright © 1995-2000
Gregory Walker (gwalker@jump.net), Creator of
Trinity Atomic Web Site
These HTML pages are published under the Open Content License (OPL),
which is the non-software equivalent of the (GNU)
General Public License. Basically, the license allows anyone to modify and distribute
the documents as long as they make it freely available. For more information, visit the OpenContent organization. Here is a plain text copy of the OPL.
Most of the documents, photos, maps and videos presented here are from U.S. Government documents and believed to be in the public domain, unless specifically noted.
Last updated: April 2, 2000.
http://www.enviroweb.org/enviroissues/nuketesting/atmosphr/index.html
http://www.fas.org/nuke/trinity/atmosphr/index.html