On this date sixty-five years ago, the planet had witnessed the detonation of just one nuclear device. That was the Trinity test at the Alamagordo Bombing Range in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Twenty days later came the second, and four days after that came the third. Since then there have been 2,050 more - or perhaps 2,053: there may or may not have been a nuclear test in the Indian Ocean in 1979, and North Korea claims to have tested two nuclear devices, although those claims are not universally acknowledged.

They began slowly, then picked up pace as the United States and the Soviet Union -- and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, France and China -- built up massive nuclear arsenals in pursuit of a Cold War strategy that was literally MAD, centered as it was around the notion of Mutual Assured Destruction.

And every single one of them -- from that initial test in the New Mexico desert in 1945, to the detonations that confirmed the entry of Pakistan into the nuclear club in 1998 -- has been recorded and animated in this extraordinary time-lapse map by Japanese artist Isao Mashimoto