Nuclear weapons tests per year
What you should know about this indicator
- The number of nuclear tests for the United States does not include the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- This data only includes nuclear tests announced or reported by governments and/or intergovernmental organizations.
- This data does not include the "Vela Incident" of 1979 because it has not yet officially been declared a nuclear test explosion by any government or intergovernmental organization, although there is strong evidence that suggests it was.
- India's three simultaneous nuclear test explosions on May 11 are counted as only one, as are the two explosions on May 13. Likewise, Pakistan's five simultaneous explosions on May 28 are counted as a single test.
Related research and writing
More Data on Nuclear Weapons
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Nuclear weapons tests per year”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2024) - “Nuclear Weapons”. Data adapted from Arms Control Association. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Arms Control Association (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Arms Control Association (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Nuclear weapons tests per year” [dataset]. Arms Control Association, “The Nuclear Testing Tally” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.html (archived on March 4, 2026).Download
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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-nuclear-weapons-tests.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear