Is it True That Nuclear Weapons Don’t Exist?

If you’ve been experiencing any nagging worries lately about the rising cost of avocados, global warming, or the prospects of being vaporised in a surprise nuclear attack that signals the end of civilisation as we know it, I might be able to put your mind at ease regarding the latter point, at least.

You’ve been the naïve victim of a hoax now spanning eighty years and still fooling almost everyone today, although some of the higher brains out there – you know, the type who bother to do their own research – are finally starting to put the pieces together.

Nukes don’t exist, and they never have.

I hope that’s brightened up your day.

Yes, I know you probably think you’ve absorbed a few nuggets of evidence over your lifetime which might have suggested otherwise, but bear with me on this one and please try to keep an open mind.

If we bother to unpack the megatons of evidence which can easily be found in real science, video evidence, and random tweets from bored high-profile figures, we’ll see for ourselves that nuclear bombs are technically impossible, supposed footage of nuclear testing was clearly faked by clumsy amateurs, and world governments have just been trying to freak us out all this time for reasons that may or may not become as clear as a giant mushroom cloud.

I feel we should point out very early on that nobody here is trying to deny that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the only two occasions when nuclear weapons were supposedly deployed in combat in 1945.

The theory is instead proposing that all those civilians were not killed in the way that the history books usually suggest.

And ever since then, literally trillions of dollars has been spent on keeping up the pretence that these mythical nuclear devices could one day be pointing in your direction.

So by the time you’ve finished this article, I hope you’ll be able to gaze up at the skies with a new sense of joyful optimism instead of cautiously watching out for the ominous streak of a nuclear missile.

I’m afraid I can’t do anything about the rising price of avocados, though. Just steal them.

Five Minutes to Midnight

I suppose I’m quite fortunate in that I haven’t spent much of my life worrying about the bomb, as up until fairly recently, it’s never really felt like a serious threat looming large over the world.

The Cold War had already ended before I was old enough to take any interest in world affairs, and for most of my adult life it’s felt unlikely that any current head of a nuclear state would be crazy enough to even consider pushing the button. (Well, authorising other people to turn keys after pissing about with codes and counter-codes, but you know what I mean.)

You wouldn’t put a madman in charge of a nuclear state, would you? Well, that’s what I always liked to think. The problem with 2025 is that you can take your pick as to who might now fit that criteria.

I do remember my dad making a start on digging a tunnel around the back of our garage when I was a small kid. The plan had been to construct a nuclear bunker underneath the garage, but he appeared to get bored of the whole idea very quickly and we just ended up with a hazardous four-foot hole instead.

He may initially have been inspired by the memories of a decade earlier when the UK government were putting together their infamous Protect and Survive campaign which was meant to advise the population on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.

Produced between 1974 and 1980, the Protect and Survive campaign was a series of public information films, radio broadcasts, newspaper advertisements, and pamphlets which were only intended to be released to the public if the government decided that a nuclear attack was on the cards within the next 72 hours.

However, some of the public information films were leaked to the BBC and CNN, and the whole campaign sparked so much interest that the pamphlets were eventually distributed in 1980. All twenty public information films are now available to watch on YouTube and go down a real treat on date nights with a couple of bottles of good wine.

The problem with them is that the solemn advice – which included staying indoors and creating a fall-out room in which to hang out for the next 14 days whilst munching on canned goods from your survival kit – was not considered to be a particularly good method of either protecting or surviving.

For example, critics noted that you’d be far more likely to survive if you attempted to leave the area completely rather than staying indoors and making wholly inadequate dens whilst waiting to be consumed by the lingering radiation fallout.

It’s believed that the true purpose of the whole campaign may have just been to prevent widespread panic rather than actually save lives. But it must have been hard to stay calm when the admittedly soothing tones of the narrator are telling you how to brick up your windows and attach identification labels to the bodies of your dead family members after you’ve wrapped them in polythene.

They’d have been better off producing a series of cheerful cartoon shorts featuring a jolly Mr Cockroach as part of a campaign entitled “Hey You, Nuclear Apocalypse is Not All Bad News!”

In fairness, it’s probably quite difficult to strike an optimistic tone when you’re discussing life after nuclear war in which the roads and church bells have fallen silent, nobody is coming to help you, and even The Simpsons is no longer in production.

But is such a scenario even possible outside the fantastical fictional works of H.G. Wells?

Not according to a relatively recent conspiracy theory which suggests that we really should be focusing our attention on far more important things – such as alien invasions – instead of worrying ourselves about an entirely impossible future in which humankind somehow manages to bomb itself to extinction with unfeasibly powerful missiles.

On the face of it, this might sound like the craziest conspiracy theory I’ve ever attempted to tackle – and that’s saying something when some of my previous articles have pondered over whether Paul McCartney died and was replaced by an imposter in 1966, and whether a guy called Mel owned a hole on his property that was 80,000 feet deep.

But maybe the only surprising thing here is just how long it took for this particular theory to surface.

The most nonsensical conspiracies of all are surely the ones that relate to things in everyday life which can easily be disproven. For example, the ‘Finland Doesn’t Exist’ theory can be debunked by just visiting Finland, or the ‘Birds Aren’t Real’ theory can be blown wide open by, say, just looking at a bird.

But I suppose it’s more natural for conspiracy theories to emerge over stuff that the vast majority of the human race would struggle to relate to on any meaningful level.

The moon landings are an obvious target because not many of us can truly imagine what it must have felt like to step on the moon.

And bearing in mind that it’s quite tricky to blag a ticket for a guided tour of an active underground missile silo, not many of us ever get a chance to poke around the insides of a nuclear weapon or even see one close-up in real life.

In fact, the best chances of us ever seeing one close-up in real life is not likely to be a good moment to take a selfie.

We may have seen the supposed immediate effects of nuclear weapons in footage taken from various testing programs which were particularly prominent in the 1950s, and we’ll address the authenticity of those in a moment.

We may also have seen footage of the smooth cylindrical metallic shells of a garden variety nuclear missile. But what is that supposed to tell us? There could be anything or indeed nothing at all inside there. For all we know, they could just be dummies. Or maybe we’re the dummies for believing that these over-inflated thermos flasks could ever do anything more dangerous than bruise somebody’s foot.

Another layer of mystery is that we don’t really know for sure which nations have them and how many they’re sitting on.

It’s understandable that any government’s nuclear program is going to be quite secretive in nature, and we’re not likely to get monthly newsletters and updates about all the exciting new stuff that may be of interest to wacky Nuclear Enthusiasts.

But that does leave us with something of a fuzzy picture.

The Federation of American Scientists reckon that there are currently around 12,331 nuclear warheads scattered around what are widely understood to be the nine nuclear states.

That’s something of a step back from the heights of 1986 when there were an estimated 70,000 nuclear warheads in existence. Come to think of it, that’s round about the same time that my dad started digging that big hole behind our garage.

Most of those current 12,331 warheads belong to either the US or Russia who boast around 90% between them.

The US is by far the most transparent nuclear nation in the world, still regularly disclosing details on stockpile sizes, although naturally not quite giving everything away.

The UK and France are only considered to be moderately transparent, whilst Russia’s transparency is now considered to be low and steadily shrinking.

The other lot are all pretty downright evasive.

China, India and Pakistan don’t tend to disclose very much at all, whilst North Korea has a tendency to act all cocky but their claims are not usually considered very reliable.

Meanwhile, Israel is the only one of the nine nuclear nations that refuses to publicly acknowledge their nuclear status, preferring to adopt a state of ambiguity.

We all seem to know they have them but they’re not going to admit it.

South Africa is the only nation that used to have nuclear weapons but dismantled their entire arsenal in the 1990s, presumably because they got fed up of playing along with the charade.

That’s not counting former Soviet republics that returned their weapons to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But considering that all these figures are estimates and nuclear programs have a habit of keeping us all in the dark, it did make me wonder what would be the point of going to all the effort of creating real nuclear weapons when you could just take Israel’s stance and give everybody a cheeky wink instead of confirming or denying that you have them?

How do we know that Israel isn’t craftily bluffing by just shrugging and saying “Well, we ain’t saying we got ‘em but we ain’t saying we ain’t!”

And how do we know for sure that other nations haven’t either secretly built up stockpiles without telling anyone, or perhaps more likely, vastly over-exaggerated or even completely fabricated their nuclear capabilities to scare off potential aggressors?

If I was the Emperor of Saltershire, I’d definitely take the latter approach.

Whenever anyone asked me if I had nuclear bombs, I’d just reply: “Yes mate, we got bloody millions of ‘em. In fact, we’re thinking of launching a few just to get them out of the way because everyone keeps tripping over the damn things.”

That kind of talk might make Iceland think twice before launching a full-scale invasion. And it hasn’t cost me anything to develop real nuclear weapons which I gather must be a quite expensive and pretty challenging little project.

Just ask Iran.

We often hear that Iran is now only “weeks away” from developing a nuclear weapon, but the issue is that we’ve been hearing that for decades.

And it does seem a bit surprising that in the year 2025, Iran is still struggling to figure out one end of a nuclear missile from the other, yet the US had it all cracked way back in the primitive days of 1945 – less than seven years after the secrets of nuclear fission were first discovered, and long before anyone had invented anything as sophisticated as a digital watch or a Ziplock bag.

Atomical Manoeuvres in the Dark

H.G. Wells often cops the blame for coming up with the ridiculous notion in the first place.

The English writer had a knack for making eerily accurate predictions which formed the central themes of many of his most popular works of fiction including The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man.

Actually, maybe they weren’t the best examples.

But one better example is the 1914 novel The World Set Free.

Within these prophetic pages, Wells tells the story of a futuristic war set in 1956 – not too far out, really – in which both sides possess atomic bombs powered by radioactive decay.

The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard was later inspired by The World Set Free to study how splitting the atom could produce massive amounts of energy, eventually conceiving the nuclear chain reaction in 1933.

It was the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann who built on this in 1938 and discovered a process in which bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons causes the uranium nucleus to split into smaller nuclei and releases additional neutrons which go on to split other uranium atoms, creating a chain reaction which could potentially release mind boggling amounts of energy.

This process was quickly identified as nuclear fission which could prove to be pretty useful in unlocking the potential for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

And it was the latter point that was the most pressing during these days of the Second World War which had already kicked off in Europe.

As the war progressed, it was feared that Nazi Germany was on the brink of developing a nuclear bomb which could obviously play something of a decisive role in the outcome of the war. Assuming that such a monstrous device could genuinely be produced, the race was on to see who would get there first.

Towards the end of the war, the Allied forces – well, primarily the US – were already causing some pretty major damage in Japan without the need for a science-fiction megabomb dreamed up by H.G. Wells.

Largely between 1944 and 1945, extensive napalm-based firebombing attacks were being carried out with ruthless efficiency on dozens of Japanese cities, including the most destructive aerial bombing raid in history which took place over Tokyo in March 1945 and killed over 100,000 people, destroyed 16 square miles of land, and left over a million people homeless.

But then the game-changer came into play a few months later.

The Manhattan Project had been set up a few years earlier as a collaborative effort between the US, the UK, and Canada to develop a nuclear weapon before the mad Nazi scientists.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and his buddies finally had something to show for their efforts in July 1945 when they conducted the first ever detonation of a nuclear weapon – known as The Trinity Test – in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin in New Mexico.

The testing of the plutonium-based atomic bomb with a yield of around 20 kilotons of TNT was largely judged to be a success, although scientists were still a little foggy about the potential side-effects of nuclear fallout.

Still, there would hopefully be plenty of time for further tweaking and more tests which could potentially include an alternative uranium-based version.

Or maybe not as everyone was a bit pushed for time in the dying days of the Second World War. The US decided to adopt the new strategy of “Detonate nuclear bombs, ask questions later.”

The next two ‘tests’ of nuclear devices, as authorised by President Harry S. Truman, would take place over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On August 6th 1945, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber ‘Enola Gay’ dropped an atomic bomb which was detonated around 1900 feet over Hiroshima.

The previously untested uranium-based gun-type bomb named ‘Little Boy’ packed an explosive yield of about 15 kilotons, unleashing a fireball that expanded to over 900 feet in less than a second.

The blast shattered windows over ten miles away. Over 60,000 buildings were destroyed including schools and hospitals, although not an awful lot would have been happening in the surviving hospitals anyway as 90% of the doctors and 93% of the nurses in Hiroshima had been either killed or injured in the blast.

It’s difficult to get precise figures on the total death toll, but it’s believed that between 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed instantly or within the first few days, whilst it’s estimated that approximately 140,000 people had died by the end of the year from radiation sickness and related illnesses.

Around 90% of the victims were civilians.

And the war wasn’t quite over yet.

Three days later, on August 9th, the US dropped another atomic bomb, this time over the city of Nagasaki.

This plutonium-based bomb named ‘Fat Man’ – similar to the design used in The Trinity Test – was detonated around 1,650 feet over Nagasaki, destroying more than 44% of the city and killing an estimated 40,000 people immediately, with some reports suggesting that only 150 of those were military personnel.

By the end of the year, that death toll had climbed to between 70,000 to 80,000 people. Between them, Little Boy and Fat Man had taken the lives of between 210,000 to 220,000 although estimates can vary quite considerably.

Six days later, Japan surrendered and now the war really was over, thanks to the power of the nuclear bomb.

Or so the story goes.

Even some of those who believe that nuclear bombs exist feel that the world was being lied to from the very beginning, particularly with regard to whether the atomic bombings were in any way justified.

The official line at the time was that the use of the atomic bombs put an end to a war which could have gone on to claim a million American lives during an Allied invasion of Japan.

But of course there were bound to be ethical questions raised over whether such a move constituted a crime against humanity.

In more recent years, it’s been suggested that Japan was already on the brink of surrender before the first bomb dropped, that deploying the second bomb just three days later was completely unnecessary and bordering on genocidal, whilst others have claimed that the true purpose of the bombs was to end the war before the Soviet forces piled into Japan to claim a stake in post-war negotiations over the future of Eastern Asia.

I don’t think we’re going to change any fervent convictions today over whether killing hundreds of thousands of civilians for the greater good could ever be justified.

But it is worth stressing that Japan was absolutely not on the brink of surrender.

I mean, they didn’t even surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima which would have prevented the deployment of the second atomic bomb. And it still took Japan six whole days to finally surrender after Fat Man fell on Nagasaki – in contrast to Germany which had already surrendered about three months earlier, and France which had surrendered before the war even began, just to be sure that everyone got the memo.

The point is that Japan knew there was no hope of winning the war but they were carrying on fighting regardless in the hope of securing favourable terms in the post-war negotiations and perhaps keeping their Emperor on the throne, along with some of their land gains.

Dozens of their cities had already been firebombed yet still they carried on, even after Hiroshima which the Japanese minister of war refused to acknowledge was destroyed by an atomic bomb.

It took a second atomic bomb to finally convince Japan to wave the white flag. And historians point out that had they not done so, it wouldn’t just have led to the loss of a million American lives. It would obviously have led to further deaths across the Allied forces, but as Japan seemed determined to fight until the last man standing, it could also have led to the complete obliteration of Japan.

Even so, if I was one of hundreds of thousands of civilians looking up at an atomic bomb falling over my city, I doubt that I’d be entirely convinced by any arguments of legitimacy.

Going back to the nature of the bombings, some may find it distasteful to even question the manner in which all those victims perished, and we’ll come back to that thought later in the article.

But for now, it’s worth emphasising again that nobody is questioning the death toll or the fact that hundreds of thousands of mostly civilian Japanese victims were bombed to death by the US in a move that put an end to the Second World War.

But what is up for a more technical debate is the type of bombs that killed them. Were they really these devastatingly powerful devices plucked from the pages of a book by H.G. Wells, or were they something not quite so extraordinary as we’ve been led to believe?

The far-right stand-up comedian, conspiracy theorist, and all-round bellend Owen Benjamin posted several Tweets in 2023 in which he put forward his doubts over whether the two Japanese cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons. One of those Tweets has now racked up almost thirty million views.

The point made by Owen Benjamin and his army of followers is that there didn’t appear to be much in the way of fallout radiation in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki following the atomic bombs. As he puts it:

There are no nuclear bombs with fallout radiation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki never had any fallout radiation. The whole narrative and all the evidence is absurd. Nukes are fake!

Looking back at those Protect and Survive broadcasts and leaflets, they do appear to paint a picture of a city in utter devastation after the dropping of a nuclear bomb.

The fortunate – or perhaps unfortunate – survivors are staggering around a battered radioactive landscape of ash and smoke and melted milk bottles in which the only remaining fragment of hope is to try and make it through another full day before you succumb to inevitable radiation sickness.

But where was the fallout radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

There are apparently some people wandering around the cities today with Geiger counters, suspiciously observing the total lack of radiation in the areas.

That’s maybe not too surprising eighty years after the events.

Even the official website of the City of Hiroshima states that radiation levels in the area today are equivalent to the natural background radiation found anywhere on Earth and have no adverse effects on human bodies. They might just be trying to reassure potential tourists, though.

On a more recent note, those same enthusiasts with Geiger counters have also apparently been wandering around the scenes of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the 2011 disaster at Fukushima – both of which supposedly let loose massive amounts of residual radiation, and yet the Geiger counters are strangely silent.

Is this because both of these so-called “nuclear disasters” were as staged as the moon landings?

Now, I’m aware we probably shouldn’t be taking the opinions of someone like Owen Benjamin too seriously. I half-suspect that he’s just trolling his followers, but he does have a disturbing history of endorsing Nazi policies, denying the holocaust, and getting banned from several major social platforms after making racist, antisemitic, and homophobic posts.

Whilst not a card-carrying Flat Earther, he has also expressed doubts over the Earth being an oblate spheroid, and at one point he denied that panda bears were real, claiming that they were either fabricated, genetically engineered, or just people mucking about in costumes.

But perhaps a slightly more credible and contemporary opinion came from the Russian-American aviation pioneer Alexander de Seversky who was a veteran of the first World War and worked as a strategic air advocate during the Second.

Alexander took the time to visit both Hiroshima and Nagasaki only a month after the atomic bombs dropped, and he shared his findings in an article later published in Reader’s Digest in 1946.

Whilst he never outright states in the article that he didn’t believe in nuclear bombs, Alexander de Seversky did make several surprising observations during his trip. Here’s a condensed version of his findings:

In Hiroshima, I was prepared for radically different sights. But Hiroshima looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities in Japan. Only one of the city’s twenty bridges was down. Hiroshima’s clusters of modern buildings in the downtown section stood upright. It was obvious that the blast could NOT have been so powerful as we had been led to believe. It was extensive blast rather than intensive.

I had heard of buildings instantly consumed by unprecedented heat. Yet here I saw the buildings structurally intact, and what is more, topped by undamaged flag poles, lightning rods, painted railings, air raid precaution signs and other comparatively fragile objects. At the T-bridge, the aiming point for the atomic bomb, I looked for the ‘bald spot’ where everything presumably had been vaporized in the twinkling of an eye. It wasn’t there or anywhere else. I could find no traces of unusual phenomena.

Those Protect and Survive pamphlets never mentioned anything about vegetation growing again within a month of a nuclear attack, or how a city could be pretty much back to normal again within a decade or so, and yet this is exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Whilst nobody in their right minds is suggesting that the attacks were staged, this does raise the question of whether the attacks involved the deployment of an apocalyptic radioactive super-weapon or something rather less fantastical and rather more conventional.

It’s interesting that everyone still talks of the horrific death tolls from the two atomic bombs, but we don’t spend half as much time reflecting on the napalm firebombings which were carried out by predominantly American forces in the preceding months over dozens of other Japanese cities. As we’ve already mentioned, the death toll from the Tokyo firebombing alone was over 100,000 which puts it in the same league as the death tolls from the atomic bombs. In total, it’s estimated that around 200,000 people – again, the vast majority of them civilians – were killed in the napalm attacks.

So could it be that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just two further examples of this dressed up as a new superweapon to really scare the Japanese? And that nothing at all was vaporised or exposed to radiation from a single blast, but was instead destroyed by yet another sustained campaign of chemical firebombing?

Canadian author and conspiracy theorist Henry Makow – who funnily enough also invented the popular card game Scruples in 1984 – believes that he may have found another clue in the US air combat logs from World War 2.

According to Henry, these logs revealed that a fleet of 66 US airplanes were officially sent out to bomb the Japanese city of Imabari on the very same day that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Henry finds this quite odd as Imabari had already been wiped out in previous firebomb attacks, leading him to conclude that these combat logs were a smokescreen for the Hiroshima operation which would be a secretive napalm raid carried out by 66 airplanes – just about the typical size for a conventional firebombing.

This is all starting to sound a little shady to me, and you know what they say about where there’s smoke…

Fade Away and Radiate

Whilst we have yet to see the detonation of a third nuclear bomb in conflict, there’s plenty of footage to absorb of nuclear testing around the world in which the only victims were mannequins.

The Soviet Union developed their first nuclear bomb just four years after the US in 1949 and went on to create the most powerful device in history ever to be detonated in 1961.

With a yield of 50 megatons of TNT, the Tsar Bomba was over 1,570 times more powerful than the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

A few years earlier in 1958, the US Air Force had briefly considered nuking the moon.

Well, they didn’t plan to totally obliterate it as that would have been a bit controversial.

But the proposed Project A119 would have seen the US detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon as a show of force to the Soviets and indeed the rest of the world as the explosion would have been visible from Earth.

The project was ultimately shelved when it was decided that actually landing a man on the moon would be a more positive and popular achievement than just lobbing bombs at it.

The Soviet Union had also come up with a similar plan themselves, but again they decided not to proceed over fears of the warhead landing back on Earth and potentially causing a messy international incident.

We didn’t tend to see so much nuclear testing in the wild after the US, The Soviet Union, and the UK – who had arrived third to the nuclear party in 1952 – got together to sign The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. So essentially nuclear testing was forced underground.

France and China were the only other two nuclear states at the time and they refused to sign the treaty but nobody really gave a shit as the overwhelming majority of over 2,000 nuclear tests conducted since 1945 were by either the US or the Soviet Union.

By 1996, all nuclear explosions on Earth were banned in all environments with the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, although India, Pakistan and North Korea have not signed on the dotted line.

It’s a bit weird that Israel bothered to sign it, considering they’re still refusing to acknowledge they even have nuclear weapons.

Saltershire would have been quite happy to sign it too, but nobody ever got in touch.

However, back in the good old days when there were no outdoor smoking bans, drunk skydiving was considered acceptable, and nuclear testing was a public spectacle to be enjoyed with a bottle of Bud, the most popular events were conducted by the US on a desert northwest of Las Vegas known as The Nevada Test Site.

Mainly conducted through the 1950s, these often had fun names such as Operation Teapot, Operation Nougat, and Operation Buster-Jangle.

And probably the most memorable were the ones involving the erection of a ‘Doom Town’ which were filled with very real furnished houses, shops, cars, fire engines, radio stations, and the whole works.

The only fake element was the presence of human beings. As it was presumably quite difficult to find willing human volunteers to sit in the houses and wait for the detonation of a nuclear bomb, they had to make do with mannequins instead.

In a nice optimistic touch, one of the Doom Towns from Operation Teapot was given the more cheerful nickname of ‘Survival Town’. That wouldn’t have convinced me to move in, although to be fair, it still sounds like a more appealing prospect than moving into the old Disney town of Celebration in Florida.

But maybe the mannequins weren’t the only fake elements of Doom Town after all, as some sharp-eyed modern viewers have noticed a couple of odd things about the footage of these so-called nuclear tests.

Millions of listeners of the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience were treated to an insightful episode in 2023 in which the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen highlighted some inconsistencies in the footage and pondered over the conspiracy theories, although he never actually expressed his full support for the theory.

For example, in a scene taken from one of the 1953 tests that formed Operation Upshot-Knothole – I hope nobody was paid to come up with these names – there’s an odd little glitch just before we see the explosion.

A car just randomly appears behind a house from nowhere. It gets nuked along with everything else in sight, but it wasn’t even there a second earlier.

Another glitch can be seen in footage from Operation Teapot in which a man is seen parking a car just outside one of the Doom Town houses and then wandering through the front door just before a nuclear blast rips the house apart.

This is clearly a very real human and not some weird kind of highly advanced animatronic mannequin. We have to assume that he wasn’t just carelessly wandering around Doom Town right before a scheduled nuclear detonation having lost track of the time.

So this leads us to conclude that there’s something dodgy going on here, and faked fuckery is afoot. But how would you even go about faking a nuclear explosion?

Marc Andreessen put forward the theory on The Joe Rogan Experience that these Doom Towns were never actually built in the Nevada desert. It was all staged with miniature table-top models. This might explain why the flimsy constructions are ripped apart with relative ease like a couple of fireworks destroying a cheap doll’s house.

As Joe Rogan observes some of the explosion footage himself, he concedes: “Boy, that does look fake.”

If that doesn’t convince you, then let’s take a second to consider how on Earth it’s even possible to view footage of a nuclear blast.

I mean, we’re supposed to be watching the total annihilation of houses and the utter destruction of everything that happened to be inside them. We’re watching cars and trees and power lines and everything in sight turn to ash.

And yet we’re meant to believe that the cameras filming all this stuff were somehow sturdy enough to survive the intense heat completely intact, unlike anything else in the whole area?

And we’re also meant to believe that the film inside the cameras survived and wasn’t in any way damaged by the radiation?

It’s not as if any of the footage even gets a bit wobbly during the blasts. The cameras appear to have the magical ability to remain stable and completely unaffected by the nuclear carnage. Clever, that.

These tests were clearly just an effort to put the wind up the Soviet Union who then had to resort to faking their own even bigger nuclear tests in response.

It’s probably a good job that we all calmed down a bit with the nuclear testing from the 1960s, otherwise we could have ended up with some poor soul accidentally scorching their own fingers.

There are several other logical points to consider when pondering the problematic possibility of such a petrifyingly powerful projectile.

Some have argued that the very idea is simply impossible, as any fissionable material would be completely incinerated before a nuclear chain could be triggered.

Developing a nuclear weapon certainly sounds quite tricky, and we come back to the question of why a country like Iran is still struggling in this department.

The US had this sorted just seven years after discovering nuclear fission. The Soviets cracked it just four years later. How could any nation still be grappling with something that was solved way back in the simpler black-and-white days of the 1940s?

Come to think of it, if Germany was so close to developing their own nuclear weapons during the Second World War, how come they never got round to finishing off their science projects at any point over the subsequent eighty years?

Was it just because they couldn’t be arsed to get involved in this global charade of unholy smoke and scorched mirrors?

Another thing: How have we managed not to blow ourselves to smithereens by now?

If such powerful weapons have existed since 1945, it’s hard to believe that the human race would have had the restraint to resist launching just one little nuclear bomb during a particularly grumpy day at the office.

And even if we’re to accept that the heads of nuclear states are always perfectly rational and sensible folk, then how likely is it that the technology never once fell into the hands of terrorist groups – the kind of people who wouldn’t even mind getting blown up in retaliation just as long as they got to make their point first?

And of course it’s quite difficult to take any nation seriously when it comes to discussion of nuclear weapons because we never know how honest everyone is being with each other.

You’ve got Israel tapping their nose whilst you’ve got North Korea setting off firecrackers and making out they’re the most powerful nuclear state in the world. For all we know that title might actually belong to Sweden, but they’ve managed to keep quiet about it all this time.

The UK wasn’t averse to mild exaggeration, either.

Following the Second World War, the British government had hoped that the US would continue to share nuclear technology which it considered to be a joint discovery made during the original Manhattan Project between the US, the UK, and Canada.

Unfortunately, the US had different ideas following the passing of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act which prohibited the sharing of this “restricted data” with any other foreign nation.

By the early 1950s, the old atomic bombs were old hat anyway.

The US developed and tested the world’s first hydrogen bomb – or thermonuclear bomb – in 1952 which used a combination of fission and fusion.

A small fission device – well, pretty much an atomic bomb – acts as a trigger. When detonated, it releases enormous heat and pressure which in turn forces hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium to fuse, creating an even bigger bang – often tens to hundreds of times more powerful than your weak-ass atomic bomb.

Simple, really. I don’t know what those Iranians are fannying about at.

The problem for the UK is that they weren’t having much joy with these new-fangled hydrogen bombs either, and they figured that the only way of getting a seat back on the nuclear table with the US was to develop one – or at least to pretend they had developed one.

The prime minister Harold Macmillan was eventually in a position to announce in 1957 that the testing of three UK hydrogen bombs had been a complete success, and this paved the way for the 1958 UK/US Mutual Defence Agreement, opening the door to ongoing nuclear cooperation between the two nations.

The minor issue is that those three initial tests from 1957 had in fact consisted of two complete duds, whilst the other was indeed a successful detonation…but of a fission bomb rather than a thermonuclear bomb.

It’s true that the UK did eventually get round to developing proper hydrogen bombs the following year. But the jury’s still out on whether the supposedly successful results from the 1957 tests were just a premature celebration or a calculated attempt to mislead the US.

Harold Macmillan never bothered to correct his statements, and the full truth wasn’t revealed until decades later.

Still, it worked. Well, the bombs didn’t, but you know what I mean.

So you can’t trust anyone in this game, not even your allies or “special relationship” buddies.

And we’re left with a stack of unanswered questions about dodgy footage, impossible cameras, missing radiation from nuclear attacks, suicidal men wandering around houses in Doom Town, unreliable statistics, and a warhead’s worth of other stuff that doesn’t quite add up.

Still, it would be nice to leave it there and just work on the assumption that nuclear bombs don’t really exist. They were just an invention designed to scare the population, intimidate other countries, and funnel away trillions of dollars for the Illuminati whilst occasionally producing empty shells and miniature tabletop displays.

And just imagine what a world without nukes would look like.

It would certainly feel like a less frightening place. Or would it?

Perhaps the Second World War would still be going on now. Perhaps you wouldn’t be reading this article today as your ancestors would have been far more likely to have popped their clogs on the battlefield.

Perhaps further long-winded and bloody wars would have been inevitable if there was zero concern about conflicts escalating into nuclear strikes. I could be out there right now polishing my bayonet whilst attempting to hold back yet another ferocious charge from the Tibetan Army.

Hmm, maybe we should take another look at this before we fully make up our minds…

Always The Sun

One of my favourite conspiracy theories of all suggests that nuclear weapons really do exist – but none of them are equipped with any kind of propulsion system.

The idea is that if mutual destruction is assured, there’s not much point in wasting any effort on making the missiles actually go anywhere.

It’s quite a sweet and efficient idea in a way as you’re saving your enemies from doing the dirty work by just blowing yourselves to kingdom come. But if Saltershire ever found itself on the brink of inevitable nuclear conflict, I’d be quite tempted to let the other guys go first.

Of course, it’s also a very silly and nonsensical idea. But you could say exactly the same thing about most of the points we’ve presented so far.

Let’s tackle the simpler stuff first, such as the footage taken from the 1950s nuclear tests in the Nevada desert.

The dodgy bits involving vehicles and humans randomly appearing and disappearing from view aren’t a sign of fakery but more an indicator that we’re not looking at continuous rolling footage here; we’re looking at edited footage that has been spliced together for your nuclear-based entertainment.

Some of the establishing shots would have been filmed just to make sure that the cameras were working. The car that suddenly teleports next to the side of the house just wouldn’t have been placed into position yet when those first shots were taken.

I feel this is blindingly obvious when you’re looking at the footage from Operation Teapot in which a man cheerfully strolls into a house in Doom Town before it gets blown to bits. Surely nobody in their right minds would assume that this was one long shot in which a man was killed; it’s just an establishing shot merged with a later shot when the bomb was detonated, and this is made even more obvious when you see that several cars parked around the house disappear in-between the shots.

But how are we even looking at such footage taken from cameras that surely would have been destroyed in a nuclear blast?

Well, the first thing to bear in mind is that the people responsible for filming the tests knew what they were doing. It wasn’t just a case of handing over a camera and a hard hat to the tea boy and advising him to stand quite far away from the detonation. These guys were experts and innovators in their admittedly quite niche field of “Trying to Film a Nuclear Explosion on a First Take.”

But to figure out how they did it, we only have to look at declassified military reports, along with a very helpful book from 2007 entitled How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb written by Peter Kuran. This guy wasn’t actually there – in fact, he’s a widely acclaimed visual effects artist which might instantly raise more suspicion. That’s a bit like Stanley Kubrick writing a book called How to Photograph a Moon Landing. But Peter Kuran did claim to have invested ten years of research into his exhaustive book which is even more than I spent on the research for the forthcoming article Are Panda Bears Real?

For Operation Teapot, around fifty telescopic cameras were positioned from between 2,750 feet to 10,500 feet away from ground zero. Or 838 to 3,200 meters if you prefer.

The cameras were placed inside lead-lined steel boxes that were perched on top of steel poles ranging from between 8 to 18 feet in height which had been planted deep into concrete bases.

The cameras were usually pointing in entirely the opposite direction which might sound a bit batty but that’s because they were facing mirrors positioned inside the steel encasings. These sacrificial mirrors were unlikely to survive the blast, but they would reflect the footage back to the protected cameras before shattering to pieces and invoking seven years of bad luck.

So in a nuclear nutshell, the telescopic cameras were always positioned pretty far away from the blast, planted deep enough in the ground to remain sturdy, and high enough to avoid disruption from dust and debris and limbs from random passers-by. Meanwhile, the thick steel cases and armoured glass helped to protect the specially treated film from the effects of radiation.

Apparently, they did have a go at filming interior shots of the final moments of the houses in Doom Town, but these aren’t as well documented and perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t turn out quite so well. Whilst some of the cameras somehow survived, the view was completely consumed by dust almost immediately after impact.

In fact, not all of the exterior camera work was a triumphant success, either. We’re obviously only able to view the footage from the cameras and film that survived the ordeal, but there were plenty of other occasions in which the cameras were destroyed, the footage was ruined by dust, or the film was damaged by radiation.

It turns out that filming an atomic bomb is a tricky affair which will probably involve a few setbacks and quite a few spare cameras, but it’s not impossible.

But what of the bombs themselves?

Whilst some have argued that nuclear bombs are impossible, I would imagine they’ve probably never had jobs working with nuclear fission or fusion.

The idea that any fissionable materials would burn before a nuclear chain could be triggered is just a misunderstanding of the processes which don’t even involve the heating of the materials such as uranium or plutonium. This is not like just burning a bit of wood or coal, it’s about releasing the energy locked inside atoms by splitting them apart or forcing them together.

It’s not something I could do in my shed tonight, but I’m not going to argue with principles of physics which have been well-established for decades.

Groups of terrorists are probably quite unlikely to knock up a nuclear device in their sheds either, and of course entire nations have often dragged their heels in getting nuclear bombs rolling off the factory production line.

There were a few crucial factors at play when The Manhattan Project developed the first nuclear weapon in a relatively brief window of time, not least the urgency of the situation, the cream of top global scientific talent at work on the project, and perhaps most significantly, the absolutely unprecedented resources that went into the effort of getting a result before Nazi Germany could unlock the secrets at their end.

Incidentally, The Manhattan Project could have pushed for a few more tea breaks as it transpired that Nazi Germany wasn’t even close to developing a nuclear weapon, and never pursued the idea afterwards due to post-war restrictions, treaty obligations, and general political and cultural shifts in priorities.

The Soviet Union were fairly quick off the mark too, thanks in part to effective espionage and infiltration of The Manhattan Project, or to put it another way, by cheating and looking over the shoulder of the school swot who bothered to do his homework.

But the fact that two nations became nuclear in the 1940s doesn’t make it any easier for a non-nuclear state to get the ball rolling in 2025.

Developing a nuclear bomb still requires unfathomably huge resources, supremely dangerous materials that are difficult to source on eBay, the talents of the biggest brains on the planet, and the kind of industrial infrastructure that usually comes with its own postcode.

The situation isn’t made any easier by much tighter international scrutiny, political pressure, the global restriction on those crucial materials, and a general feeling from the rest of the world that Iran really shouldn’t be mucking about with nuclear weapons. They could have somebody’s eye out with one of those if they’re not careful.

So there are some pretty strong reasons why not many states are bothering to even pursue the idea of nuclear weapons, and why this kind of stuff is way, way out of the league of terrorist groups.

It’s cheaper all-round if you just make sure that you’re good buddies with at least one of the states that do have them.

Speaking of which, there are obviously some equally compelling reasons why none of those nuclear states have ever pushed the button yet as they would almost certainly be sealing their own destruction.

It’s not inconceivable that we might reach a point one day where a crackpot head of a nuclear state finds himself facing a bleak future or on the verge of getting pushed out of power, and decides to initiate a nuclear war as he has nothing to lose.

Why should the rest of the world continue to exist if his own time is up?

I find it a great concern that the theory of deterrence relies heavily on power-mad and self-obsessed human beings keeping a cool head when things are going tits up. Again, the problem with 2025 is that you can take your pick as to who I might be talking about.

But the general point behind these weapons of mutual assured destruction is that we don’t ever use them. We just let other countries know that we have them to avert future wars.

How much reliable information actually gets passed on is always going to be a grey area as this is not the kind of stuff that you share on a public PowerPoint.

It seems unlikely that there’s a nation out with a secret stockpile of nukes as that would defeat the whole purpose of having them. It wouldn’t be much good launching nuclear missiles at your aggressor with a smug declaration of “I bet you weren’t expecting that, you losers!” as the consequences could be pretty swift.

But in terms of reliable figures, it’s not like all the nuclear states are just pulling random numbers from the contaminated air.

We have a fairly good idea of the number of nuclear warheads belonging to the two biggest nuclear nations, as up until recently, the US and Russia participated in the ‘New START’ nuclear reduction treaty which includes regular on-site inspections and data exchanges that help verify the numbers.

Russia did suspend participation in 2023, voicing some quite reasonable complaints and questions such as why other nuclear nations such as the UK and France weren’t taking part.

But even so, the treaty helped back up the claims made by the two nations who own around 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads between them.

There remains the question over why non-nuclear states don’t just pretend to have nukes, and the answer is that it would probably be a proper pain in the arse that wasn’t worth the effort.

It would take incredible cost and commitment to try and create a semi-credible illusion of nuclear capabilities, and you’d be at risk of creating a shitstorm with other countries without anything to back up your bragging. Whilst Iraq never outright claimed to have weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s and early noughties, their ambiguity and obstruction of UN inspectors didn’t exactly end well for the regime.

More importantly, you wouldn’t get away with it. Modern intelligence and detection can figure out whether you’re bluffing with your nuclear testing. This is how we know that North Korea weren’t just larking about with their nuclear programs, as we were able to detect the seismic data and radioactive isotopes, confirming seismic events and nuclear fission.

You’d look like a proper nation of dumplings if you were caught faking it.

It would be a better use of your time and resources to either develop nuclear weapons for real, or offer to buy a good dinner for another nuclear nation.

You’re more than welcome to come and have a chat with Saltershire but bring your purse.

So whilst I’m now fairly convinced that nuclear bombs might be real, we still have to deal with the mystery over whether genuine atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and why the Russian-American aviation pioneer Alexander de Seversky was so surprised by the lack of unusual phenomena during his trip to the sites just a month later. Could there be any truth in the claims that the attacks on the cities were actually just another example of the napalm firebombing that had been inflicted on dozens of other cities across Japan, but under the pretence of a war-quelling super-weapon?

I was initially quite intrigued by those allegations of Canadian author Henry Makow who reckoned that US air combat logs showed how a fleet of 66 US airplanes were supposedly sent out on a firebombing mission over Imabari which had already been wiped out.

I didn’t actually think that these airplanes may have instead firebombed Hiroshima, but I did wonder if these logs were meant to serve as decoys to mislead the Japanese forces over the true intent of the day.

But in fact, Imabari had only been bombed the very day before Hiroshima, leading to the destruction of around 80% of the city, whilst the Hiroshima bombing was openly logged with the true target and nature of the mission.

So it’s difficult to see what Henry Makow was waffling on about. He should maybe have stuck to designing card games, he was quite good at that.

As for the aviator Alexander de Seversky, his 1946 article in Reader’s Digest was widely criticised by scientists and military experts.

There’s a misconception in some circles that the detonation of any nuclear bomb over a city will result in a barren radioactive landscape for centuries.

It’s true that a ground burst would have more of a long-term impact, but the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air bursts which exploded respectively at altitudes of 1900 and 1650 feet.

Around 90% of the nuclear material rose into the stratosphere with the huge fireballs that immediately formed after the blast, and most of the uranium or plutonium would have dispersed quite quickly into the atmosphere or been blown away by the wind.

Whilst some black rain would have fallen back down on Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath, the radiation levels on the ground would have been back to tolerable levels within just a few weeks.

But that’s not to meant to undermine the devastating impact of these genuine nuclear attacks, and the joint US-Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation has provided ample evidence of thermal radiation, blast waves, vaporisation of objects near ground zero, and thousands of victims who died from exposure to radiation, as well as a sharp spike in cancer rates in later years from those who survived the atomic blast.

So it’s difficult to see what Alexander de Seversky was waffling on about, although it’s been suggested that he was on some kind of mission to downplay fears over these terrifying new nuclear weapons. He should maybe have stuck to flying airplanes, he was quite good at that.

Perhaps there is something inherently disrespectful going on here for the victims, survivors, and the families of those who perished in two devastating nuclear attacks.

It must be hard to hear that everything you think you know about the nature of the sheer annihilation is wrong, particularly when it’s coming from some silly twat wandering around with a Geiger counter.

The kind of people who believe that nuclear bombs are impossible must also presumably believe that all nuclear energy is equally impossible, and that the power plant disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima were staged.

Incidentally, there most certainly is still some residual radiation hanging around in both those cities, so the conspiracy theorists might want to check the batteries in their Geiger counters.

The disaster at Fukushima wasn’t quite as severe as the reactor didn’t explode in that case. Following massive decontamination and clean-up operations, the current radiation levels are now not considered to be dangerously high.

It’s a different story in Chernobyl where a 30-kilometer exclusion zone – known as The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation – is still considered to be one of the most radioactively contaminated areas on the planet.

But the main reason why the nuclear conspiracy theory is one of the silliest theories you’ll ever hear this side up of our flat Earth is because the number of people who are in on the hoax would be frankly ludicrous.

You’d be arguing against events which are amongst the most meticulously documented in history, and casting aside mountains of evidence including death reports, medical reports, the testimony of survivors, radiation surveys, video footage, photographs, and whole libraries of declassified reports relating to nuclear testing.

You’d be arguing against decades of scientific consensus on nuclear fission, and against the testimony of potentially millions of people around the world, be they scientists, technicians, military personnel, politicians, or even just observers of the giant mushroom clouds frequently billowing above the skies of the Nevada desert throughout the 1950s.

And most implausibly of all, the hoax would have required eighty years of unwavering cooperation between nations all around the world to keep up the pretence for no immediately discernible good reason and at nothing short of colossal expense.

Hard to swallow when many of these rival countries would struggle to agree on what type of pen might be used to sign a treaty.

It’s all beginning to feel just a tad unlikely, isn’t it?

I fear that my early optimism at the beginning of the article may have been misplaced. Nuclear bombs are very real and might one day be coming to a patch of sky near you.

But don’t worry too much about it. It’s not the end of the world.

And even if we are inching ever closer to midnight, a world without real panda bears and affordable avocado toast is barely worth contemplating.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main claim of the article?

The main claim of the article is that nuclear weapons do not exist and have never existed.

What evidence does the article present to support the claim that nuclear weapons are a hoax?

The article suggests that supposed footage of nuclear testing was faked, and that world governments have been trying to scare the public with the idea of nuclear weapons.

What does the article say about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The article acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but questions whether nuclear weapons were actually used.

What is the Protect and Survive campaign?

The Protect and Survive campaign was a series of public information films, radio broadcasts, newspaper advertisements, and pamphlets produced between 1974 and 1980 to advise the population on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.

What is the Tsar Bomba?

The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear device ever tested, with a yield of 50 megatons of TNT, developed by the Soviet Union in 1961.

What is the Partial Test Ban Treaty?

The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space, forcing nuclear testing underground.

What is the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty?

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996 banned all nuclear explosions on Earth in all environments, although some countries have not signed it.

What is the Manhattan Project?

The Manhattan Project was a collaborative effort between the US, the UK, and Canada to develop a nuclear weapon before Nazi Germany during World War II.

What is the New START treaty?

The New START treaty was a nuclear reduction treaty between the US and Russia that included regular on-site inspections and data exchanges to verify the number of nuclear warheads.

What is the article’s stance on the existence of nuclear weapons?

The article initially presents the conspiracy theory that nuclear weapons do not exist but ultimately concludes that nuclear bombs are real and pose a genuine threat.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Is it True That Nuclear Weapons Don’t Exist?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.