Humanity has a strange habit: we can fill the world with the most beautiful things, and also with the most terrifying ones. On one side, there’s Van Gogh’s Starry Night. On the other, there’s the nuclear bomb—also born from human intelligence. And somehow, both come from the same brain.
When the first nuclear detonation happened in 1945, nobody fully understood what we were dealing with. That test, named “Trinity,” was a turning point: humanity had reached the level where it could play with the very building blocks of nature—atoms. And spoiler alert: over the next 80 years, we played this game a little too much.
In total, there have been more than 2,000 nuclear explosions so far. Yes, you read that right. Two. Thousand. This was not a “try once and stop” experiment. The United States alone conducted 1,032 tests. The Soviets? They didn’t want to fall behind, so they carried out 727 tests.
And here’s the fascinating part: you can actually see all of these detonations in a single video. Ehsan Rezaie of Orbital Mechanics created a visualization where every explosion appears as a circle on a world map. The size of the circle represents the blast’s power. It looks simple at first, but the longer you watch, the more your brain goes, “whoa.” Because what’s on screen isn’t just dots—it’s a real-time chart of humanity’s progress in science and its capacity for self-destruction.
A Mushroom Cloud Seven Times Taller Than Everest
Let’s get into some numbers. In 1961, the Soviets detonated the largest nuclear bomb in history: the Tsar Bomba. This 50-megaton hydrogen bomb was tested over the Barents Sea. The mushroom cloud it created rose to a height seven times taller than Mount Everest. Imagine a second mountain suddenly appearing in the sky. The shockwaves were so powerful they shattered windows 900 kilometers away. To put that in perspective: a bomb goes off in New York, and windows break in Detroit.
Why Is This Video So Striking?
“Trinity – Visualization of Nuclear Detonations” isn’t just a video—it’s a dark summary of human history. You watch the map: one place lights up, then another, then another… Over time, the Earth starts to look like a flickering Christmas tree.
And watching it, you can’t help but ask: why? Why did we set off so many bombs? The answer is pretty simple: a power contest. “My bomb is bigger than yours.” It’s the playground logic of children—except the playground, in this case, is the planet itself.
Fascinating and Terrifying at the Same Time
This visualization does two things at once:
- It informs. You clearly see how many tests there were, which years were the busiest, and which countries led the way.
- It unsettles. Because behind the numbers, there’s not just test sites but the constant possibility of annihilation.
Seeing one explosion isn’t pleasant. But seeing hundreds of them, mapped and animated over time, makes you realize: we’ve been out of our minds.
Nuclear weapons remain one of the greatest threats to our world today. But thanks to Ehsan Rezaie’s video, we can grasp this threat in a way numbers alone could never show. Circles swell, maps glow, and in a few minutes you’ve essentially watched the most dangerous lab notebook in human history.
So this isn’t just a video worth watching—it’s one worth reflecting on. Because “Trinity” reminds us: our story isn’t only written with the bright moments of science and art, but also with the shadows we create with our own hands.
And maybe the real question is: will we ever manage to put those shadows out for good?
