More Than 2,000 Tests

August 29, is the International Day against Nuclear Tests.

The United Nations General Assembly established the day in 2009 to mark the closure of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan and, more broadly, to confront what nuclear testing has done to people and land everywhere it has happened. 

It is a day for truth-telling on a global scale. 

Since the first atomic detonation ‘Trinity’ in New Mexico  in July 1945, more than 2,000 nuclear tests have been carried out around the world. Roughly 528 of them in the atmosphere, releasing a combined destructive force equivalent to some 29,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Those numbers can numb rather than inform, so it is worth naming the places and people behind them. 

In the Pacific, the United States, United Kingdom, and France detonated more than 300 nuclear weapons across atolls and islands whose communities had no say in the decision. From the Marshall Islands, where the 1954 "Bravo" test blanketed inhabited islands in radioactive "snow," to Kiritimati and French Polynesia.

In Australia, British testing at Maralinga, Emu Field, and the Monte Bello Islands in the 1950s permanently displaced Aboriginal peoples, including the Kokatha and Anangu, severing generations from country. 

France's tests in the Algerian Sahara exposed both Algerian communities and French conscripts, many of them still fighting for recognition and compensation decades later.

In the Soviet Union, more than 450 tests at Semipalatinsk exposed over 1.5 million people, while further tests continued at Novaya Zemlya. 

And in the United States, the Nevada Test Site's nearly 1,000 detonations fell on Western Shoshone land and downwind of communities across Nevada, Utah, and Arizona who are still, today, fighting for full recognition under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. 

Across every one of these histories, the same patterns hold: Indigenous and colonised peoples bore the heaviest burden, land was rendered uninhabitable, and cancers, cardiovascular disease, reproductive harm, and intergenerational trauma outlasted the tests themselves by decades.

The reason nuclear testing on this scale largely stopped is not a treaty. It is a moratorium, an informal, unilateral practice of restraint that the Soviet Union adopted in 1990, the United States in 1992, and China in 1996, held in place since then by political norm rather than binding law.

 The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, opened for signature in 1996, was meant to make that restraint permanent and legally enforceable. Thirty years later, it still has not entered into force: eight specific states have yet to ratify it, and the treaty's fate remains hostage to exactly the kind of geopolitical brinkmanship it was designed to end.

In October 2025, the United States announced it would direct the resumption of nuclear weapons testing "on an equal basis" with other nuclear-armed states, drawing immediate alarm. 

 Whether or not an explosive test ultimately proceeds, the fact that this is again a live political question, more than three decades after the last full-scale detonation, is exactly why an international day against nuclear testing still matters. 

This is where redress and prevention meet. 

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 2021, is the first international instrument with binding provisions through Articles 6 and 7, which requires victim assistance and environmental remediation for people and land harmed by nuclear weapons use and testing. 

With the Treaty's First Review Conference approaching in December 2026, this August 29 lands at a moment when the international community has both an opening and an obligation: to strengthen the norm against testing before it erodes further, and to make good on redress for the communities who have already carried this harm for generations, across the Pacific, in Kazakhstan, Australia, Algeria, the United States, and beyond.

The Nuclear Truth Project exists to hold both halves of that work together. We document the truth of nuclear harm across every region it has touched, build the agency of the communities who have lived it, and strengthen the international solidarity and accountability needed to keep the promise of "never again" from quietly becoming "again, if convenient." 

Thirty-five years after Semipalatinsk closed, the world proved that testing could be stopped. This International Day against Nuclear Tests is a reminder that proving it once is not the same as making it permanent. The work of finishing the job belongs to all of us.

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