Two Thousand Flashes on a Map

Video · Data Visualization · History

At 5:29 in the morning on July 16, 1945, in a stretch of New Mexico desert called Jornada del Muerto — Journey of the Dead Man — a plutonium bomb named the Gadget was detonated from a 100-foot steel tower. The flash was visible 160 miles away. The shockwave knocked observers to the ground at distances they had calculated to be safe. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching from a bunker, said nothing for a long moment. Then the counting began.

This visualization by the Canadian collective Orbital Mechanics — released in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Trinity test — plots every recorded nuclear detonation from that morning in New Mexico through to North Korea’s tests in the late 2000s. Each flash is color-coded: atmospheric explosions in red, underground in yellow, underwater in blue. Each carries a label: date, country, yield, location. The video runs for about fourteen minutes. By the end of it, more than two thousand flashes have appeared on the map.

The most striking thing about the visualization is not any single flash. It is the density. During the 1950s the map lights up with a frequency that looks almost casual — test after test after test across Nevada, across Kazakhstan, across the Pacific atolls. The pace of detonation in those years was roughly one every ten days. The United States alone conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests over the course of the Cold War. The Soviet Union conducted more than seven hundred. France tested in Algeria and then French Polynesia. The United Kingdom tested in Australia, on aboriginal land, without informing the people who lived there.

—The largest single detonation in the video — and in history — is the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, October 1961. Yield: 50 megatons. That is 3,300 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Its fireball reached a diameter of eight kilometers. The shockwave circled the Earth three times.

The visualization does not editorialize. It does not need to. The accumulation is the argument.

On what the format achieves

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On the Format — What Data Visualization Does That Language Cannot

A fact stated once is absorbed and filed. A fact stated two thousand times, in sequence, over fourteen minutes, on a map, does something different to the person receiving it. The visualization format makes the accumulation legible in a way that no table of numbers can. You watch the flashes multiply across Nevada and you understand — not intellectually but viscerally — that these were not rare events. They were routine.

Orbital Mechanics is a group of electronic musicians and visual artists. The piece was made to mark a 70th anniversary. It is one of several visualizations of the same data — Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto made an earlier version covering 1945 to 1998. What distinguishes Orbital Mechanics’ version is the sound design: a low, sustained electronic score that neither dramatizes nor distances, but holds the viewer at the precise register the subject requires.

There is a moment in the video — roughly eight minutes in, during the most intense period of Cold War testing — when the map becomes difficult to read because there are too many simultaneous flashes. The Nevada Test Site and the Soviet test ranges at Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya are lighting up in such close succession that the dots overlap. This is not a limitation of the visualization. It is its most precise statement. At the height of the arms race, the rate of detonation outpaced the capacity of a map to represent individual events.

The video ends with the most recent tests on record at the time of its production — North Korea, 2006 and 2009, two solitary flashes in the far east of the map, long after the others have stopped. The silence after them is different from the silence before the first flash. Before Trinity, there was simply no such thing. After North Korea’s tests, there is the knowledge that the capability exists in nine countries and that the map could light up again.

The video has been described, widely, as chilling. It is. But the specific quality of the chill is worth naming: it is not the horror of a single event but the weight of a pattern. Two thousand flashes, each representing a deliberate human decision to detonate a nuclear device, is not an accident of history. It is a record of choices made, over seven decades, by governments acting in what they considered to be their national interest. The map shows where those interests were located. The count shows how many times they converged on the same conclusion.

Aabakcus.comVideo  ·  Orbital Mechanics  ·  2015