Nuclear War? It Would Appear We've Already Had One...

This is appalling but still riveting, in the kind of way that teeth, hair and eyeballs all over the freeway is...

Listen to the "music of the spheres" as this animation shows the number of times a nuclear weapon has been detonated between 1945 and 1998, and which nation detonated them.

In the great novel Catch-22, Milo Minderbinder took a contract from the Nazis to bomb his own airfield. That's what this looks like. Who needed the godless communists to drop The Bomb when we were doing a great fucking job of it ourselves? We blew up the Nevada desert 1026 times, including some tests contracted by the British, after they blew up the South Australian Outback nine times from 1953-57.

And what the fuck is up with the French? Did they really need to set off 210 nuclear tests? Most of them were in the vast reaches of the South Pacific, but in the early days of the French Bomb 17 were detonated in their still-owned-but-not-for-long North African colony of Algeria.

Check out the map of detonations. When you couple that with the oil spills, I'd say that we as a species are pretty well on the way to engineering our own demise.

And maybe we deserve it...