In 1999, an 87-year-old British woman held a press conference in front of her home to announce that for nearly four decades, she’d worked as a spy for the Soviet Union. In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy. From World War II through the Cold ...read more
For tellers at a Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania bank, the final days of March 1979 should have felt like business as usual. Instead, they were sheer chaos: customers piled up, trying to withdraw money in the days before ATMs. “Customers were stopping by with their cars packed up to ...read more
Ronald Reagan is often lauded as the U.S. President who won the Cold War, by orchestrating a massive arms buildup that the Soviet Union couldn’t afford to match, and by giving a famous 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to ...read more
What would happen if the United States were about to be hit by nuclear weapons? Hopefully, the government would provide some warning through the federal alert system. But that system hasn’t always been in place—and it hasn’t always worked. For over 40 minutes on February 20, ...read more
At first glance, the job posting looks like a standard help-wanted ad for a cross-country trucker. Up to three weeks a month on the road in an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, traveling through the contiguous 48 states. Risks include inclement weather, around-the-clock travel, and ...read more
For several decades now, the U.S. has sought to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But ironically, the reason Iran has the technology to build these weapons in the first place is because the U.S. gave it to Iran between 1957 and 1979. This nuclear assistance was part of ...read more
President Bill Clinton took the podium on October 18, 1994, with aspeech that reads like a sigh of relief—the announcement of a landmark nuclear agreement between the United States and North Korea. “This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for ...read more
The White Helmets comprise an unarmed, neutral organization of more than 3,000 volunteer rescue workers operating in opposition-held areas of Syria. When airstrikes rain down on civilian targets in the war-torn nation, the men and women of the White Helmets carry out ...read more
Though an American and a Japanese museum that tell the story of the atomic bomb agree on the horrors of nuclear war, they can’t agree on whether to call for the abolition of the weapons that cause it. As a result, the Los Alamos Historical Museum—located in the New Mexico city ...read more
Donald Trump shocked the world on March 8, 2018 by announcing that he would visit North Korea to meet with its dictator Kim Jong-un, making him the first president to visit the “hermit kingdom.” It’s a move that many, including members of the State Department, couldn’t have ...read more
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
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 Incident On 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
