This video is so disturbing, every time. Every detonation is an implied threat, a political message, a promise of violence, a show of power. Every detonation is an environmental catastrophe, a long-term cost that we're still paying, both in the collection and refining of the nuclear material and in the detonation. Every detonation is an economic burden, human time and effort spent making a tool that only makes destruction. The US effectively bankrupted the USSR with this competition.

The systemic cost of the whole thing is just mind-boggling. There's really only one silver lining that I see. Humanity had access to a terrifying new weapon, the power to wipe itself out really. And we didn't do it. At the time of highest ignorance, when very few people in the entire world really understood how bad it could be, and when political tensions were high, we did a lot of posturing but we didn't actually do the worst we could have.

It could have been so much worse, and we (collectively) chose not to make it that way. I do find some comfort in that.

A personal crackpot theory that is almost certainly wrong, is that aliens heard the emissions from these blasts and came to investigate wtf was going on. Physically impossible but still comes to mind everytime I see this.