List of nuclear weapons tests
This has been done on test sites on land or waters owned, controlled or leased from the owners by one of the eight nuclear nations: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, or has been done on or over ocean sites far from territorial waters.
The standard official list of tests for American devices is arguably the United States Department of Energy DoE-209 document.
[9] Some significant tests conducted by the United States include: After the fall of the USSR, the American government (as a member of the International Consortium International Science and Technology Center) hired a number of top scientists in Sarov (aka Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos and thus sometimes called Los Arzamas) to draft a number of documents about the history of the Soviet atomic program.
In addition, the large-scale military exercise was conducted by Soviet army to explore the possibility of defensive and offensive warfare operations on the nuclear battlefield.
The exercise, under code name of Snezhok (Snowball), involved detonation of a nuclear bomb twice as powerful as the one used in Nagasaki and approximately 45,000 soldiers coming through the epicenter immediately after the blast[19] The exercise was conducted on September 14, 1954, under command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov to the north of Totskoye village in Orenburg Oblast, Russia.
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1992, Ukraine and Russia inherited the USSR's nuclear stockpile, though Ukraine later handed theirs over to the latter, while Kazakhstan inherited the Semipalatinsk nuclear test area, as well as the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Sary Shagan missile/radar test area and three ballistic missile fields.
A tremor, with magnitude reports ranging from 4.7 to 5.3, was detected at Mantapsan, 375 km (233 mi) northeast of P'yongyang and within a few kilometers of the 2006 test location.
On 12 February 2013, North Korean state media announced it had conducted an underground nuclear test, its third in seven years.
A tremor that exhibited a nuclear bomb signature with an initial magnitude 4.9 (later revised to 5.1) was detected by both Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization Preparatory Commission (CTBTO)[34] and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
[46] There have been a number of significant alleged, disputed or unacknowledged accounts of countries testing nuclear explosives.
On April 15, 2020, the Wall Street Journal published details of a US State Department report on activity during 2019 at China's Lop Nur test site, alleging supercritical experiments could have occurred in an absence of effective monitoring.
[47][48] China’s possible preparation to operate its Lop Nur test site year-round, its use of explosive containment chambers, extensive excavation activities at Lop Nur, and lack of transparency on its nuclear testing activities – which has included frequently blocking the flow of data from its International Monitoring System (IMS) stations to the International Data Center operated by the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization – raise concerns regarding its adherence to the “zero yield” standard.Israel was alleged by a Bundeswehr report to have made an underground test in 1963.
[50][full citation needed] Scientists from Israel participated in the earliest French nuclear tests before DeGaulle cut off further cooperation.
The United States and South Korea quickly downplayed this, explaining it as a forest fire that had nothing to do with the DPRK's nuclear weapons program.
The pro-Soviet newspaper, The Patriot, reported that "Pakistan has exploded a nuclear device in the range of 20 to 50 kilotons" in 1983.
[52] But it was widely dismissed by Western diplomats as it was pointed out that The Patriot had previously engaged in spreading disinformation on several occasions.
In 1983, India and the Soviet Union both investigated secret tests but, due to lack of any scientific data, these statements were widely dismissed.
[53] In their book, The Nuclear Express, authors Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman also allege that the People's Republic of China allowed Pakistan to detonate a nuclear weapon at its Lop Nur test site in 1990, eight years before Pakistan held its first official weapons test.
If this flash detection was actually a nuclear test, a popular theory favored in the diary of then sitting American President Jimmy Carter, is that it resulted from a covert joint South African and Israeli nuclear test of an advanced highly miniaturized Israeli artillery shell sized device which was unintentionally detectable by satellite optical sensor due to a break in the cloud cover of a typhoon.
