These are the 12 largest nuclear detonations in history
Since the first nuclear test on July 15, 1945, there have been over 2,051 other nuclear weapons tests around the world.
No other force epitomizes the absolute destructive power humanity has unlocked in the way nuclear weapons have. And the weapons rapidly became more powerful in the decades after that first test.
The device tested in 1945 had a 20 kiloton yield, meaning it had the explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT. Within 20 years, the US and USSR tested nuclear weapons larger than 10 megatons, or 10 million tons of TNT. For scale, these weapons were at least 500 times as strong as the first atomic bomb.
To put the size of history's largest nuclear blasts to scale, we have used Alex Wellerstein's Nukemap, a tool for visualizing the terrifying real-world impact of a nuclear explosion.
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