The nearest nuclear explosion to your home

All 2,057 nuclear explosions are on this map. Pick a city or press Find me.

By Coru · Published 2026-10-30 · Updated 2026-10-30

Your map

Pick a city, tap the map, or press Find me.

The nearest explosion for each city

Explosion coordinates are approximate; some are known only to within tens of kilometres. Distance is not danger: this page does not estimate anyone's exposure.

City	km	Nearest explosion
Almaty	649	Unnamed, 23 November 1984, up to 20 kt
Anchorage	2,150	Long Shot, 29 October 1965, 80 kt
Arkhangelsk	157	Agat, 18 July 1985, 8.5 kt
Astana	228	Meridian-1, 28 August 1973, 6.3 kt
Auckland	4,033	Totem 1, 14 October 1953, 10 kt
Baku	551	Well 2T, 6 December 1969, 30 kt
Beijing	1,081	Unnamed, 9 October 2006, 0.7–2 kt
Berlin	1,559	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Bishkek	585	Meridian-3, 15 August 1973, 6.3 kt
Bogotá	3,356	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
Buenos Aires	4,165	Argus I, 27 August 1958, 1–2 kt
Cairo	2,014	Takhta-Kugulta, 26 September 1969, 10 kt
Cape Town	2,720	Argus I, 27 August 1958, 1–2 kt
Chicago	1,206	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
Delhi	568	Shakti 1-3, 11 May 1998, up to 20 kt
Denver	249	Rulison, 10 September 1969, 40 kt
Dubai	920	Unnamed, 30 May 1998, up to 18 kt
Dublin	2,619	Dnepr-1, 4 September 1972, 2.1 kt
Glasgow	2,321	Dnepr-1, 4 September 1972, 2.1 kt
Honolulu	1,321	Teak, 1 August 1958, 3.8 Mt
Irkutsk	170	Rift-3, 31 July 1982, 8.5 kt
Istanbul	1,093	Klivazh, 16 September 1979, 0.3 kt
Jakarta	1,820	Mosaic G1, 16 May 1956, 15 kt
Kazan	357	Region-2, 24 November 1972, 2.3 kt
Kharkiv	63	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Krasnodar	290	Takhta-Kugulta, 26 September 1969, 10 kt
Krasnoyarsk	342	Kvarts-4, 17 September 1984, 10 kt
Kyiv	357	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Lagos	1,933	Beryl, 1 May 1962, 20–150 kt
Las Vegas	93	Project 57 1, 24 April 1957, yield unknown
Lima	4,985	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
London	2,489	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Los Angeles	353	Agouti, 18 January 1962, 6.4 kt
Madrid	1,618	Gerboise Bleue, 13 February 1960, up to 200 kt
Manila	2,165	Fat Man, 9 August 1945, 21 kt
Mexico City	1,510	Gnome, 10 December 1961, 3 kt
Minsk	708	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Moscow	309	Globus-1, 19 September 1971, 2.3 kt
Mumbai	878	Unnamed, 18 May 1974, up to 20 kt
Murmansk	134	Dnepr-2, 27 August 1984, 1.7 kt
Nairobi	4,384	Unnamed, 30 May 1998, up to 18 kt
New Orleans	141	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
New York	1,755	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
Nizhny Novgorod	238	Globus-1, 19 September 1971, 2.3 kt
Novosibirsk	297	Kvarts-4, 17 September 1984, 10 kt
Odesa	506	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Omsk	578	Benzol, 18 June 1985, 2.5 kt
Paris	2,380	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Perm	99	Grifon, 8 September 1969, 7.6 kt
Perth	1,285	Hurricane, 3 October 1952, 25 kt
Prague	1,497	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Reykjavik	2,454	Dnepr-1, 4 September 1972, 2.1 kt
Riga	1,021	Globus-1, 19 September 1971, 2.3 kt
Rome	1,969	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Rostov-on-Don	158	Klivazh, 16 September 1979, 0.3 kt
Saint Petersburg	663	Globus-1, 19 September 1971, 2.3 kt
Samara	80	Region-2, 24 November 1972, 2.3 kt
Santiago	5,234	Argus III, 6 September 1958, 1–2 kt
Saratov	273	Region-3, 20 August 1972, 6.6 kt
Seoul	451	Unnamed, 9 October 2006, 0.7–2 kt
Shanghai	772	Fat Man, 9 August 1945, 21 kt
Sochi	334	Takhta-Kugulta, 26 September 1969, 10 kt
Stockholm	1,195	Dnepr-1, 4 September 1972, 2.1 kt
Sydney	1,879	Totem 1, 14 October 1953, 10 kt
São Paulo	3,707	Argus I, 27 August 1958, 1–2 kt
Tallinn	962	Globus-1, 19 September 1971, 2.3 kt
Tashkent	218	Meridian-3, 15 August 1973, 6.3 kt
Tbilisi	500	Takhta-Kugulta, 26 September 1969, 10 kt
Tel Aviv	1,670	Takhta-Kugulta, 26 September 1969, 10 kt
Tokyo	691	Little Boy, 6 August 1945, 15 kt
Toronto	1,654	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
Tyumen	61	Tavda, 6 October 1967, 0.3 kt
Ufa	116	Kama-1, 8 July 1974, 10 kt
Vancouver	1,182	Shoal, 26 October 1963, 12 kt
Vienna	1,397	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Vilnius	879	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Vladivostok	308	Unnamed, 9 October 2006, 0.7–2 kt
Volgograd	112	Unnamed, 6 September 1961, 11 kt
Voronezh	338	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Warsaw	1,042	Fakel, 9 July 1972, 3.8 kt
Washington	1,429	Salmon, 22 October 1964, 5.3 kt
Yakutsk	284	Kraton-4, 9 August 1978, 22 kt
Yekaterinburg	296	Tavda, 6 October 1967, 0.3 kt
Yerevan	655	Takhta-Kugulta, 26 September 1969, 10 kt

New York's went off in a Mississippi forest

New York's nearest nuclear explosion happened 1,755 km away, and not in any desert. On 22 October 1964 a 5.3-kiloton device went off 2,710 feet down in the Tatum Salt Dome, in the pine belt of Lamar County, Mississippi, 21 miles from Hattiesburg. Chicago, Washington, Toronto and New Orleans get the same answer. It is the only place in the eastern United States known to have had a nuclear weapons test.

The point was eavesdropping. The US wanted to know whether it could read the seismic signal of a bomb fired in salt, so that it could monitor other countries. In 1966 it set off a second, smaller device inside the cavity the first one had made.

The salt held. The Department of Energy says no radionuclides from the detonations reached the surface. But "there is still radioactivity in the cavity", and the work left tritium in shallow sediments near ground zero. In 2010 the land passed to the state as a wildlife refuge and working forest, with a deed restriction that prohibits access to what lies below. A granite monument stands in a clearing among test wells.

London's put out a fire

London's answer is stranger: 2,489 km away, a gas well in Ukraine. On 9 July 1972 the Soviet Union used a 3.8-kiloton explosion, 2,483 metres down, to seal a runaway well near Krasnohrad. It is also the nearest for Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw and Prague.

It sounds like a joke, and it worked. In December 1963 a gas well at Urtabulak in Uzbekistan went out of control, losing more than 12 million cubic metres a day, enough to supply a city the size of St Petersburg. For nearly three years nothing stopped it. Engineers then drilled a slanted hole to within about 35 metres of the runaway well and lowered in a 30-kiloton charge. They fired it on 30 September 1966. "Twenty-three seconds later the flame went out, and the well was sealed."

Five gas-well emergencies got this treatment. The last, Pirit near Naryan-Mar in 1981, did not seal the well.

The Soviet Union did this 122 times

Between 1965 and 1988 the Soviet Union set off 122 "peaceful" explosions at 115 sites, the teal dots on your map, to study some 13 uses. The programme was secret, and local populations "were seldom informed".

A canal. Three 15-kiloton charges in the Perm region in 1971, code name Taiga, as a trial for a Pechora to Kama canal. The crater came out about 700 metres long and only 10 to 15 metres deep. Radioactivity was detected abroad, and the US and Sweden protested.
A dam. Kristall, 1974, 3 km from Udachny in Yakutia, for a diamond company.
A coal mine. Klivazh, 1979, in the Yunkom mine in the Donbas: 0.3 kilotons to relieve the strain in seams with over 200 explosions or rock bursts a year.
An ore body. Dnepr-1, 1972, in a mine near Kirovsk, to break up apatite. A gas leak gave the town 30 to 40 milliroentgens, about 10 percent of a year's background dose.
The worst one. Kraton-3, 24 August 1978, in Yakutia. Permafrost around the hole melted, and radioactive gas and steam vented at the moment of the blast. Measurable radioactivity was carried 150 km over unpopulated forest and tundra.

Four answers about one hole

Moscow's nearest is Globus-1, 309 km away: 2.3 kilotons in the Ivanovo region on 19 September 1971, part of the search for oil. Eighteen minutes after the blast, a fountain of gas and water carrying radioactive sand burst out a metre from the shaft and ran for almost 20 days. The accident stayed classified for a long time.

Then ask what the site is like now:

1998, Milo Nordyke's review of the Soviet programme: minor leakage, the area decontaminated, radiation at or near regional background.
2008, Rossiyskaya Gazeta on a St Petersburg institute's expedition: no fence, the concrete slabs carried off by villagers, a rusty sign, and caesium in bear droppings hundreds of thousands of times over the limit.
2015, Interfax: 270 million roubles, 400 cubic metres of soil removed, wells plugged, and the site "meets sanitary norms". The waste 600 metres down stays.
2019, the journal Radiation Hygiene, on measurements from 2018: the dose does not exceed 0.3 millisieverts a year, but the quality of the cleanup is "unsatisfactory".

Why there is no plain answer

These are different years and different yardsticks, but together they show how hard a plain answer is to get. Nordyke saw why: with little hard data from the atomic ministry, a rational discussion is difficult and the public "is quite prepared to believe the worst".

America's version was called Plowshare

The US ran its own programme for civilian uses: 27 tests and 35 warheads. Proposals included widening the Panama Canal and blasting a harbour in Alaska. Fallout from the Sedan shot in 1962 contaminated more US residents than any other nuclear test. Three blasts in New Mexico and Colorado tried to free natural gas, and the gas was seen as too radioactive. At Rulison, Colorado, the Department of Energy still monitors nearby gas wells.

Distance is not danger

This map does not estimate anyone's exposure. A small underground blast 300 km away and an open-air one thousands of kilometres away are very different things, and fallout travelled far beyond these dots. The red dots are the open-air ones, including Totskoye in 1954, 40 kilotons at a height of 350 metres during an exercise involving tens of thousands of troops, and the Tsar Bomba, 50 megatons over Novaya Zemlya on 30 October 1961.

If your teeth formed after 1955, their enamel carries radiocarbon from these tests. It dates a person's birth to within 1.6 years. The closest trace of a nuclear bomb to you may not be on this map at all.

Where these numbers come from

The base is the SIPRI catalogue (Bergkvist and Ferm, 2000): 2,051 explosions up to 1998, plus North Korea's six tests, 2,057 in all. Distances are measured on a sphere. Coordinates are approximate and some are rounded to a whole degree, so do not read the kilometres literally.

We corrected the catalogue. Names and places of Soviet peaceful explosions come from the appendix to Nordyke's paper. For 24 rows with no coordinates and for obvious typing errors we used Nordyke or the location of the range named in the row. The catalogue marks more explosions as peaceful than Nordyke's 122, because it includes experiments at the Semipalatinsk test site; other lists give 124. We do not count Vela Uniform, which included the Mississippi test, as peaceful. Where a yield is known only as a range, you see the range.

The Find me button works everything out in your browser. Your coordinates are not sent or stored, and a link you choose to share holds a point rounded to about 10 km.