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^{One of the few true fallout maps}

Visit our global fallout page to learn more¹

'Civilized countries' - that now form what we dub the 'nuclear club' - conducted over 2,000 nuclear blasts on the Earth, and these entities - the executioners of her slow death - vigorously deny any irreversible, incurable damage.  

If you're looking for fallout maps, you won't find any such map here or anywhere that will satisfy your whim or sophisticated inquiry.  Why?  Because the executioners, to their best of their satisfactions, don't want you to see them.  What you can and will see - if you seek it - are bits and pieces of the destruction: a high reading of radioactivity in wheat or milk here, of air over there, a trajectory map here, and a rare truthful analysis there.  Put them together and you have what would happen in a small-but-non-mutually-destructive nuclear war (that we erringly refer simply to as the Cold War): the radioactive fallout circling - for eons - around the Earth and within her biosphere as a consequence of our historic, 'peaceful' tit-for-tat nuclear testing exchange is no different than the fallout in the event of an actual nuclear exchange had 400 or so atomic and hydrogen bombs fell only in remote regions of land and sea on the globe.   How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?  How would that change the way you see your life and your health? Or your country or the world?

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto (2003)

"... a haunting visualization of the 2053 atomic explosions that occurred on this planet, from the “Trinity” test at Los Alamos.."

Unofficial guide to the '1945-1998' video:

For a detailed list of all known nuclear explosions through 2006, visit here

YouTube visualization of nuke tests just in Nevada, visit  here

For a detailed list of Nevada above-ground nuke tests, visit here (table on left)

U.S.'s high altitude and So. Atlantic nuke tests, visit here; Colorado tests

For a list of the names/dates of France's many nuke tests *under* Moruroa in the Pacific, visit here

There are many dimensions to a nuclear test.  The '1945-1998' video, for example, illustrates global nuke tests across space and time (although some test series, like those jammed in 'time and space' in Nevada, Australia (Emu Field, Maralinga), etc..., are not plotted even remotely precisely in 'space' - the 'blips' are scattered all over (i.e., the U.S. Southwest) to distinguish each individual shot in each series).  

The 'visualization' fails to show a good approximation of magnitude (i.e. Tsar Bomba, a hydrogen bomb detonated by USSR in 1961, was about 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima but the scale of the blips don't demonstrate this relativity.)  Magnitude is very important because the vast, vast majority of the fallout that dusted the Earth from pole to pole originated from just a few dozen or so U.S. and U.S.S.R. above-ground hydrogen bomb tests.  (This map of global nuclear tests conducted since 1945 does a slightly better job at depicting magnitude/yield.)  

All of the intense nuclear testing activity you see in the video in late 1958 and then again in 1961-1963 created life-threatening levels of radioactive fallout.  The Earth's air and vegetation became so radioactive that tainted U.S. milk supplies were occasionally dumped into sewers, eating fish and drinking tap water were at times prohibited in Japan, Geiger counters went off the scale when rain puddles in New York and Chicago were tested, people in small towns in Utah were told to stay indoors after Nevada 'shots' or stopped at highway road blocks to have radioactivity on their cars' surfaces washed off, thousands of sheep dropped dead or were born deformed in the grazing hills of Nevada and Utah, and hundreds of inhabitants of Pacific islands in the mid-1950s suffered their own 'Hiroshima' when the U.S. government evacuated them several days (too late) after 'Bravo's' fallout forever ruined their beautiful tropical atoll.

Fallout maps are the hardest to find because fallout travels in three dimensions across time and through the stratosphere, troposphere, and biosphere.  Fallout maps are rare or nonexistent because governments globally never really put much effort into tracking the fallout and still don't really care to find out where it fell.  Can you guess why?  Why would not wanting to know - or to have the public know - the whereabouts of the fallout serve the interests of nuclear powers? 

Nuclear testing locations in U.S. (another version), Southwest, and Australia  (contrast map showing areas of repeated dosing of radioactive fallout)

Comparison of radioactivity of nuclear events in history (visit here for explanation)

1,100,000  Number of Curies of I-131 released from Hanford Nuclear Reservation during 1940s and 1950s
2,970,000    Number of Curies of radioactive noble gases released by Millstone Unit 1 reactor (CT) in 1975
6,000,000    Number of Curies released from Baneberry 'underground' nuclear test (NTS)*
10,000,000    Number of Curies of Carbon-14 from global atmospheric nuclear testing **
20,000,000    Number of Curies released from Kyshtym nuclear waste storage tank explosion in 1957
13,000,000- 45,000,000   Number of Curies of radioactive noble gases released by Three Mile Island
132,000,000   Number of Curies in subsurface areas at NTS left over from all underground testing
150,000,000   Number of Curies of Iodine-131 (I-131) released from Nevada testing (1951-1962)
150,000,000   Middle range of estimated Curies released from Chernobyl +
8,000,000,000    Number of Curies of I-131 released from US Marshall Islands nuclear tests in the 1950s  
12,000,000,000 Number of Curies released into the atmosphere from Nevada testing in 1950s and 1960s***
20,000,000,000   Number of Curies of I-131 released worldwide from all nuclear tests from 1945 to 1962 

Dose maps: Most of the dose maps of Nevada nuclear fallout (see here) across the United States are based on the shoddy, unreliable gummed-film data collected in the 1950s by the Atomic Energy Commission.  

Radiological measurements: Thankfully, there is a small amount of good fallout data from the Public Health Service (PHS) - the predecessor to the EPA - published in their monthly unclassified publication of articles, graphs and tables titled "Radiological Health Data and Reports" from April 1960 through the publication's termination in December 1974.  That publication contained the first-ever rigorous and comprehensive set of fallout-radiation measurements even though "continental" nuclear testing in Nevada by the U.S. commenced in 1951.  (View a graph of Nevada testing since 1951).   View this data here  (contents recently moved from this page)

¹ A more recent reconstruction of global fallout was produced in the paper 'Re-construction and updating our understanding on the global weapons tests 137Cs' by M. Aoyoma, K. Hirose, and Y. Igarashi that was e-published in a March 2006 issue (and in print in the April 2006 issue) of the Journal of Environmental Monitoring.  Their figure (Fig. 1)  is protected by copyright but presented here in a miniaturized form (hopefully we may succeed in presenting to the public this crucial illustration in a thumbnail-form and avoid any infringement problems).  Also, we discuss the scientists' mapping efforts in our boxed feature 'The Northern Plains Hotspot' on our global fallout page.  The authors call the figure a 'geographical distribution of global 137Cs fallout':