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Nuclear Explosions

Every nuclear detonation is a documented physical event with a time, a place, and an official record. The nuclear_explosion dex files them as events — one slot per detonation — with every field cited to the government document it came from.

The record begins where the atomic age does: Trinity, the 100-foot-tower test at the Alamogordo Bombing Range on July 16, 1945; the two combat detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks later — which the official US test catalog explicitly does not count as tests, and neither does this dex; Operation Crossroads at Bikini in 1946, including the first underwater nuclear detonation; Operation Sandstone, the three dawn tower shots at Enewetak in the spring of 1948 that opened the AEC's Pacific Proving Ground; RDS-1, the first Soviet test, fired at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in August 1949 — the dex's first non-US slot, filed in strict worldwide chronological order; Operation Ranger, the five dawn airdrops of early 1951 that opened the Nevada Proving Ground — the first atmospheric test series on continental US soil; and Operation Argus, the three high-altitude shots fired from a ship in the South Atlantic in 1958.

💥 Detonations filed
17
🗂️ Programs
7
📅 Span
1945–1958
📜 Provenance
9 US documents

What's in a slot

  • Time — GMT, from the DOE catalog where it gives one (Rev 16 added times and coordinates for the earliest tests), cross-checked against the operation reports' local times; every slot states its time basis. The two documents agree to the second once you know Bikini ran on UTC+11 and Able went off fifteen seconds before nine — at Enewetak, all three Sandstone pairs agree to the minute at UTC+12, each shot fired just before sunrise — and at Frenchman Flat, all five Ranger pairs agree to the minute at UTC−8, dawn airdrops every one.
  • Place — catalog coordinates for the tests. For Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no held US government document states the hypocenter coordinates — so the slots carry the public-domain gazetteer entry for the city, say so explicitly, and decline to borrow precision from sources we don't hold. RDS-1 takes that honesty one step further: the clean documents place it at the Experimental Field of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, about 70 km from Kurchatov, and give no coordinates at all — so the slot carries none, and says why. Precise figures for that shot exist only in sources this platform's licence standard excludes.
  • Burst height or depth — Trinity's 100-foot tower, Able's 523 feet, Baker's 90 feet underwater, and the combat pair's burst heights carried verbatim from the Los Alamos yield study: 580 ± 15 m and 503 ± 3 m.
  • Yield, as documented — never upgraded into a measurement, and where official documents disagree, both figures ride along: the DOE catalog says 21 kt for Trinity where the DNA report says 19; the catalog says 21 kt for each Crossroads shot where the DNA report says 23. The dex carries the catalog figure and notes the other. Sandstone and Ranger are the programs where the two documents agree outright, shot for shot.
  • The record's own texture — Able burst 1,500–2,000 feet west of its planned zero; Crossroads Charlie was planned and never fired (so it gets no slot); Sandstone Yoke was postponed a day by winds and became, at 49 kt, the largest detonation to that time; RDS-1's fallout cloud defied the forecast and passed over villages that had not been warned; all five Ranger bombs were dropped on the same aiming point, and Fox was late by one day because the drop aircraft had an oil leak; Argus III took five launch attempts over six days.

Provenance

  • DOE/NV-209 Rev 16 — the US Department of Energy's official catalog of every US nuclear test: GMT times, coordinates, burst heights and depths, types, purposes, yields — and the introduction that documents the two combat detonations while declining to number them as tests.
  • LA-8819 (Los Alamos, 1985) — the definitive yield study for the combat pair: 15 kt (±20%) and 21 kt (±10%), with detonation times and burst heights from the strike-mission records.
  • DNA 6022F, 6028F, 6032F, 6033F, 6039F — the Defense Nuclear Agency's declassified reports on Ranger, Trinity, Crossroads, Sandstone, and Argus: local shot times, shot islands, delivery details, and the operational record.
  • The DTRA Semipalatinsk report and a Los Alamos history of the Russian weapons program — the US-lane record behind RDS-1: its date, local time, 20-kt yield, test area, and the device's Trinity lineage.

All are served by US government archives; every slot states which document each field came from.

Scope

Seventeen detonations across seven programs, extended program-by-program in strict worldwide chronological order. The worldwide record — roughly 2,000 detonations, 1945–2017 — is the kind's obvious future, one vetted program at a time, each held to the same licence standard whatever the conducting state.