Nuclear Weapon Tests Conducted by Country
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Nuclear Weapon Tests Conducted by CountryTesting was overwhelmingly a two-superpower affair: the United States (1,030 tests) and the Soviet Union / Russia (715) together account for roughly 83% of all nuclear tests ever conducted. France is a distant third at 210, while the United Kingdom and China are tied at 45 each. The declared and undeclared newer nuclear states tested far less: North Korea conducted 6 tests (all between 2006 and 2017), India 3 and Pakistan 2. The sharp fall-off after the top three reflects both the maturity of the US and Soviet arsenals and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, after which only North Korea has continued testing. The data captures how a technology pioneered by two rivals slowly spread to a small club of states.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Arms Control Association (Nuclear Testing Tally)
- Coverage
- 8 entities · 8 observations
- Measure
- Total Nuclear Weapon Tests Conducted (1945-2017)
- Last updated
- 13 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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