Timeline for answer to Could a nation feasibly hide its early wartime use of nuclear weapons during World War 2? by L.Dutch
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| Dec 26, 2025 at 20:25 | comment | added | Mooing Duck | @QuestionablePresence: Digging deeper, it looks like we're both right. Without the FFT, Seismometers could detect above ground nuclear tests fairly easily. After nuclear testing went underground, there were Analogue devices which could do the required frequency analysis, but those were slow and expensive, and I'm not seeing anything saying they were used much. The FFT made the required analysis fast and cheap, so once that came out (1965ish?) then Seismometers could then also identify underground nuclear tests. | |
| Dec 17, 2025 at 12:37 | comment | added | QuestionablePresence | Correction: Discrete Fourier Transformation: iflscience.com/… | |
| Dec 17, 2025 at 12:31 | comment | added | QuestionablePresence | @MooingDuck this is completely false. In fact the Test Ban Treaties weren't attempted earlier precisely because the Fast Fourier Transformation hadn't been (re)discovered yet, thereby making global detection impossible | |
| Dec 16, 2025 at 17:15 | comment | added | jeffronicus | @MooingDuck Yes, quite aside from the radioactive traces, as immense point-source explosions, nuclear blasts have distinct signatures that are detectable by seismographs and acoustic systems, whether on land, in the ocean, or in the air. There's really no way to hide or fake them. | |
| Dec 16, 2025 at 0:59 | comment | added | JBH | @user71659 "You want to make people think that you might have a nuclear weapon..." Israel definitely wanted people to think they had nuclear weapons, whether they did or not. That's quite a bit different from hoping people don't think you have nuclear weapons, despite actually using them. Thus, while your point should be interesting to Dmyt, it's not an answer to L.Dutch's point #1. | |
| Dec 16, 2025 at 0:25 | comment | added | Mooing Duck | in 1945 when USA started it's testing, Geologists across the world were wondering "What on Earth was THAT?". Once the general public knew that Nuclear bombs existed, that same year, then geologists could pretty accurately pinpoint all nuclear tests around the world, and could immediately pinpoint every nuclear test that had taken place. | |
| Dec 15, 2025 at 21:22 | comment | added | Trish | @DJClayworth December 19th, 1938, when Otto Hahn split the atom. | |
| Dec 15, 2025 at 21:16 | comment | added | user71659 | Answer to point 1: Israel. Because there are significant collateral consequences if you do have a weapon (including the NPT). You want to make people think that you might have a nuclear weapon, but can't definitely tell because it's kept secret. See also Iran. A related reason in this may be that your nuclear weapon isn't very good compared to what others have, North Korea is an example here. | |
| Dec 15, 2025 at 18:27 | comment | added | DJClayworth | And the possibility of a nuclear bomb was known as early as 1939, so the response would not be just "what on earth was that?" but "could that have been one of these nuclear bombs people are talking about?". And how did this nation get enough brilliant physicists to develop a bomb without any of the other brilliant physicists knowing who they were and where they were? The American (and other Allied) nuclear physicists know pretty much all the German physicists who were capable of developing a bomb, and the German ones knew who the Allied ones were. | |
| Dec 15, 2025 at 18:14 | comment | added | JBH | Add to this the fact that the world had been able to detect seismic activity, acoustics, and even unusual amounts of radiation (though not well) by that time. It's believable that scientists across the world would be wondering "what on Earth was THAT?" | |
| Dec 15, 2025 at 7:44 | comment | added | sphennings | Don't forget that for a small self sufficient island nation a conventional military is likely to be far more cost effective at discouraging invasion than developing a secret nuclear program plus enough nukes to destroy multiple invasion fleets. | |
| Dec 15, 2025 at 6:43 | history | answered | L.Dutch♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |