In 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the uranium atomic bomb "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima, killing at least 90,000 people immediately, poisoning hundreds of thousands more with radiation, and forever altering the essential nature of warfare. Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created this beautiful and terrifying timeline, showing each of the 2,053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998. The graphics and sounds are simple, not much more than what you could produce with an Atari 2600, but the effect is stomach churning. The timeline begins with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos, the test that caused Robert Oppenheimer to famously quote the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It ends with Pakistan testing its own nuclear weapons in 1998. (North Korea is excluded from the list, due to their tests taking place in the mid-2000s.)
Each nation gets a color assigned to its tests, and a tone when the explosion occurs. Starting around 1961, the world begins to absolutely light up, as the Cold War intensified and things like duck and cover drills became commonplace. It creates a strange kind of music as countries frantically seek to position themselves as legitimate nuclear players.
Hashimoto, who created the timeline in 2003, hopes his work shows "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons." The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty has effectively ended the age of nuclear testing—for now.
The Manhattan Project was set up midway through the Second World War and began work on developing the U.S' nuclear technology.
In May 1945 Germany signed a surrender agreement with the Allies to signal the end of the war in Europe, however, the war in the Pacific carried on and the Allies were contemplating invading Japan.
They asked Japan to surrender but the Japanese government ignored the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945.
By August 1945, the Manhattan Project had developed and tested atomic bombs at its Los Alamos base
By August 1945, the Manhattan Project had developed and tested atomic bombs at its Los Alamos base and on 6 August, a Little Boy atomic bomb, left, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by a Fat Man bomb,right, on Nagasaki three days later.
The blasts are said to have killed a total of 245,000 deaths by November 1945 and the effects from radiation are still reported to this day.
On 15 August, Japan surrendered and signed the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, officially ending World War II.
A tally of total bombs dropped is shown in the bottom right-hand corner of the video, as well as a tally that shows how many bombs each individual country has used during that time.
Flashes increase further during the early 1960s and by 1998, the U.S tested 1032 while the UK had 45 among others.
Hashimoto started the project in 2003. He created it with the goal of showing 'the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.'
