Photographers and camera crew on Eniwetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands during the Koa nuclear test as part of Operation Hardtack, a series of 35 nuclear tests conducted by the United States in 1958. | Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

The post-war international order may be tearing apart at the seams and international law is increasingly looking like a polite fiction, but we did just pass one notable milestone of global peace and stability: As of this month, the world has gone the longest time without a nuclear explosion since the atomic era began more than 80 years ago.

The last nuclear test took place in North Korea on September 3, 2017. The previous longest period without a detonation was between May 30, 1998, when Pakistan conducted its last test, and October 9, 2006, when North Korea conducted its first. We reached the new record on January 14, and are now at eight years, four months and 21 days.

A world on fire

Though they’ve only been used in war twice since their creation in 1945, Dylan Spaulding of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted in a recent blog post that “at least eight countries have detonated more than 2,000 nuclear weapons” over the years, all in tests. (For a mesmerizing and disturbing visualization of these nuclear tests, I recommend this time-lapse animation by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, which runs to 1998.)

It’s difficult for people today to imagine just how constant nuclear detonations were in the first decades after Hiroshima. At the height of the testing era in the late 1950s and early 1960s, dozens of nuclear tests were taking place every year. Most of those tests were done above ground, marked by iconic mushroom clouds.

The detonations were the visible backdrop to rising fears of a civilization-ending nuclear........

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