Nuclear Warheads Visualized

For Bright Magazine, we visualized all current nuclear warheads in the world. While we tried to use the most accurate data we could find, counting nuclear weapons is a bit like counting votes – a lot depends on who is doing the counting, and how. The data we used is from The Guardian’s Datablog and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. We used the open source tool Processing to visualize the data.

Every line equals one nuclear warhead. The size of the lines are the theoretical maximum range of the nuclear weapons. This is assuming that the missile is launched from a home country. For some countries, this is not relevant due to the availability submarines and bombers. The steam graph shows the total amount of warheads in the world. As you can see, both the US and Russia are starting to dismantling them at a slow rate.

If you live in The Netherlands, you can see the visualization as a spread in the latest Bright Magazine (#33). Also, this is the first one of a series of data visualizations for upcoming Bright Magazines. If you want a high resolution image or if you want to use the visualization for a different purpose, feel free to contact us.