If you feel uncomfortable with the idea that governments and corporations are eavesdropping on your personal data, there's a form of snooping you might like: monitoring nuclear blasts.
It means rogue states can't simply hide their weapons development in some secluded valley.
Conversely, it's harder for them to boast about their nuclear capabilities because monitoring can pick the difference between an earthquake, a nuclear bomb and a large conventional bomb.
After the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1996, an international network of 60 monitoring stations was set up.
Monitoring stations listen for infrasound rumblings at around 0.4 to 2.0Hz, well below the threshold of human hearing.
They tune into these frequencies because, like whales' songs, the sound is carried over vast distances.
At such a low pitch, the wavelength is very long. Imagine you're standing at one end of a single wave of sound. If by some magic you could look off into the distance and see the other end, the peak of the next wave would be nearly a kilometre away.
If you think of it in those terms, even detecting a sound with a frequency of 1 Hz is no trivial thing.
A monitoring station comprises an array of a special type of microphone that are able to detect these very low frequencies.
They're arranged in a star pattern, and simple geometry plus a bit of clever mathematics shows the location of ground zero.
The differences in timing indicate where the sound is coming from, which is a little similar to the way you detect the direction of sound using just two ears.
Signals from the infrasound monitors are fed into sophisticated computers that filter stray signals caused by other low-pitch sounds, such as wind and earthquakes.
The best locations are sheltered in forests, but some stations are located in windy places such as the Antarctic, which means they have to be carefully shielded to block wind noise.
Results from monitoring stations are beamed via satellite to a central location. In all, there are 60 monitoring stations around the world.
So what would the bomb actually sound like? Almost always when we see footage, the image and the sound are synchronised - but this isn't right, because light travels far quicker than sound. Usually it's also dubbed with generic bomb noises for cinematic effect.
In one example online you get a sense of what it was like for those who were there. You can hear them shout WHOA and JEEZ.
One might hope that this effort is not necessary, but sadly not. Before the test ban treaty, there were over 2000 tests.
Since then, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all detonated nuclear weapons, other states such as Iran are hoping to join the club, and it can only be a matter of time before others follow.
The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM.
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