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Nuclear Test Series

A CodeSights flagship for the history and policy crowd: 108 nuclear testing series run by seven nuclear powers, aggregated from the per-country lists into one file with each series' years, test count, devices fired, peaceful-use tests, atmospheric (non-PTBT) tests and total yield in kilotons. The unit is a test series (Operation Ivy, Operation Castle, Trinity), not an individual shot, because the roughly 2,000 individual tests live scattered across hundreds of per-operation articles; the series counts here sum to 2,026 tests and 531,641 kilotons, half a gigaton of yield. The famous story is the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, read through the atmospheric column: the United States fired 225 atmospheric tests before 1963 and only a handful after, having gone underground, while the atmospheric testing that continued belongs to the non-signatories France (50) and China (23), by test. Two countries dominate everything, the US at 1,030 tests and the USSR at 727, together 87 percent of all testing. A quieter column tells its own story, the Soviet Union's 156 peaceful-use explosions (the nuclear-explosions-for-the-national-economy program) against the 27 of the US Plowshare program. Trinity anchors the file as the first series in 1945. The United Kingdom's page is a redirect with no standardized table and is out of scope. Each row is keyed by country and series. Ten acceptance tests.
108 rows 1 file last pulled 2026-10-15
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
Test series 108 rows × 12 columns
CountrySeriesSeries_IDStart_YearEnd_YearTestsDevices_FiredPeaceful_Use_TestsNon_PTBT_TestsYield_Total_ktYield_Range_ktSeries_URL

Questions and answers

What is the Nuclear Test Series dataset?

A CodeSights flagship for the history and policy crowd: 108 nuclear testing series run by seven nuclear powers, aggregated from the per-country lists into one file with each series' years, test count, devices fired, peaceful-use tests, atmospheric (non-PTBT) tests and total yield in kilotons. The unit is a test series (Operation Ivy, Operation Castle, Trinity), not an individual shot, because the roughly 2,000 individual tests live scattered across hundreds of per-operation articles; the series counts here sum to 2,026 tests and 531,641 kilotons, half a gigaton of yield. The famous story is the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, read through the atmospheric column: the United States fired 225 atmospheric tests before 1963 and only a handful after, having gone underground, while the atmospheric testing that continued belongs to the non-signatories France (50) and China (23), by test. Two countries dominate everything, the US at 1,030 tests and the USSR at 727, together 87 percent of all testing. A quieter column tells its own story, the Soviet Union's 156 peaceful-use explosions (the nuclear-explosions-for-the-national-economy program) against the 27 of the US Plowshare program. Trinity anchors the file as the first series in 1945. The United Kingdom's page is a redirect with no standardized table and is out of scope. Each row is keyed by country and series. Ten acceptance tests.

How big is the Nuclear Test Series dataset?

108 rows in one CSV file, with 12 columns in total: Country, Series, Series_ID, Start_Year, End_Year, Tests, Devices_Fired, Peaceful_Use_Tests, Non_PTBT_Tests, Yield_Total_kt, Yield_Range_kt, Series_URL.

Where does the data come from?

It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-15. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.

Is the dataset free to download?

Yes. Every CodeSights dataset is completely free as a CSV download; a free account is all it takes. Anyone can preview the data without signing in.

Can I see the code that built this dataset?

Yes. The exact Python scraper that built it is viewable on the dataset page by any signed-in member, so every number is reproducible.

Can the data contain errors?

Automated scraping leaves room for error and the underlying sources change over time, so no version is guaranteed accurate or complete. If a number matters, verify it against the original source.

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