Nuclear Weapons
Arms Race
An arms race occurs when two or more countries increase the size and quality of military resources to gain military and political superiority over one another. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is perhaps the largest and most expensive arms race in ...read more
How a British Secretary Who Spied for the Soviets Evaded Detection for 40 Years
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
How the Three Mile Island Accident Was Made Even Worse By a Chaotic Response
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
How George H.W. Bush Finished What Reagan Started in Ending the Cold War
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
For 40 Minutes in 1971, It Seemed the End Was Near
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
The Secret 'White Trains' That Carried Nuclear Weapons Around the U.S.
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
How America Jump-Started Iran’s Nuclear Program
For several decades, 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 a ...read more
Bill Clinton Once Struck a Nuclear Deal With North Korea
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
Who Are the White Helmets?
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
Museums Still Can’t Agree on How to Talk About the 1945 Atomic Bombing of Japan
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
We’ve Been Talking About World War III Since Before Pearl Harbor
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
Atomic Bomb History
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
Manhattan Project
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
Inside the Government’s Top-Secret Cold War Hideouts
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
The Man Who Survived Two Atomic Bombs
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
What is a broken arrow?
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
5 Cold War Close Calls
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
9 Nuclear Near-Misses During the Cold War
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
History’s Worst Nuclear Disasters
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
Russia activates its nuclear command systems for the first time
Russia’s early-warning defense radar detects an unexpected missile launch near Norway, and Russian military command estimates the missile to be only minutes from impact on Moscow. Moments later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, his defense minister, and his chief of staff were ...read more
Superpowers agree to reduce nuclear arsenals
At a summit meeting in Washington, D.C., President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign the first treaty between the two superpowers to reduce their massive nuclear arsenals. Previous agreements had merely been attempts by the two Cold War adversaries to limit ...read more
The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded
On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project yields explosive results as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist ...read more
The Trinity Test
At the time World War II broke out in Europe, America’s scientific community was fighting to catch up to German advances in the development of atomic power. In the early 1940s, the U.S. government authorized a top-secret program of nuclear testing and development, codenamed “The ...read more
George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev agree to end production of chemical weapons
At a superpowers summit meeting in Washington, D.C., U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign a historic agreement to end production of chemical weapons and begin the destruction of both nations’ sizable reserves of them. According to the ...read more