Less testing was a choice. So is the future

The useful part

It accumulates, test by test, each explosion edging the world closer to potential catastrophe. Every nuclear weapon test leaves a scar on land and on water, and some who lived near test sites have carried that cost for generations, long after the testing itself ended. Tests (IDANT) exists because those dangers remain part of our shared history, and because governments still face the same choice every year.

How it works

• For four decades, the test site at Semipalatinsk was one of the places that felt it most, until its closure 35 years ago silenced a stretch of the Kazakh steppe.
• In the years before the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), opened for signature in 1996, more than 2,000 such explosions were carried out.

What to take from it

The risk of nuclear war does not rest on a single decision.

Details worth keeping

There was a time when the ground shook often. That the tremors grew rare is not an accident of history.