Nuclear Weapons

On September 15, 1961, millions of Americans who subscribed to Life magazine pulled the latest issue from their mailboxes and beheld something remarkable inside: a letter from President Kennedy addressed to them. But if the fact of the letter was a pleasant surprise, the glow ...read more

Ever since people began to speculate about “World War III,” its very name has implied its own inevitability. We talk about it not only as something that might happen, but something that will. And it’s been on our minds for a very long time.The phrase seems to have emerged during ...read more

Every year, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) puts together a shortlist to predict the winners of the annual Nobel Peace Prize. This year, Iran nuclear dealmakers Federica Mogherini and Mohammad Javad Zarif are at the top of the list. Also among the top five, for two years ...read more

The atomic bomb, and nuclear bombs, are powerful weapons that use nuclear reactions as their source of explosive energy. Scientists first developed nuclear weapons technology during World War II. Atomic bombs have been used only twice in war—both times by the United States ...read more

What would happen if the United States were about to be hit by nuclear weapons? Hopefully, you’d have at least some warning, thanks to emergency messages transmitted over television sets and radios. But that system hasn’t always been in place—and it hasn’t always worked. For over ...read more

The Manhattan Project was the code name for the American-led effort to develop a functional atomic weapon during World War II. The controversial creation and eventual use of the atomic bomb engaged some of the world’s leading scientific minds, as well as the U.S. military—and ...read more

As the Cold War heated up in the 1950s, the U.S. government devised top-secret plans to ensure its survival if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack. These “Continuity of Government” preparations included building dozens of underground bunkers and arranging to move ...read more

In 1945, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II showcased the devastating effects of nuclear weapons. It also launched the Atomic age, an era of testing these hugely destructive weapons within the U.S. and abroad to better understand their ...read more

The disaster over Spain had its roots in Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. For several years leading up to 1966, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command had been constantly flying bombers to the fringe of the Iron Curtain as part of “Operation Chrome ...read more

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to leave Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell. The 29-year-old naval engineer was on a three-month-long business trip for his employer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and August 6, 1945, was supposed to be his last day in the city. He and his ...read more

The military uses the term “broken arrow” to describe any incident in which a nuclear weapon is lost, stolen or inadvertently detonated. That might seem like a rare phenomenon, but records show that the United States has experienced more than 30 such close calls since the ...read more

World War II couldn’t destroy USS Independence. The light aircraft carrier survived three years of frantic combat in the Pacific Theater, where it weathered torpedo damage from enemy bombers and dueled with one of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most fearsome warships. Neither could ...read more

1. Another U-2 Spy Plane IncidentOn October 27, 1962, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching its boiling point, an American U-2 spy plane took off from Alaska en route to a routine reconnaissance mission near the North Pole. Pilot Charles Maultsby was supposed to use ...read more

On January 23, 1961, a B-52 Stratofortress bomber patrolled the night skies over the Atlantic Ocean. It was three days after the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, and with the Cold War in a full freeze, American bombers such as this one carrying a pair of 3.8-megaton ...read more

1. May 22, 1957: Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico Albuquerque residents enjoying a spring day on May 22, 1957, found themselves literally rocked by what felt like a nuclear explosion. They weren’t far off. No one knows precisely what happened aboard the B-36 aircraft ...read more

Chernobyl (April 26, 1986) Built in the late 1970s about 65 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine, the Chernobyl plant was one of the largest and oldest nuclear power plants in the world. The explosion and subsequent meltdown that occurred there in April 1986 would claim thousands ...read more