The icy history of Project Iceworm
Iceworm. The very word conjures all kinds of ideas. A frozen worm? A super-secret lab tucked away into the North Pole? In fact, it was a nuclear lab inside an…
The Peacekeeper Rail Garrison’s forgotten mission
Ever heard of the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison? Even if you lived through the Cold War, you might not know about this nearly forgotten nuclear mission. The 1980s were a scary…
One of the closest brushes with nuclear war was Russia vs China
As they’re now America’s two top rivals, it’s easy to forget that China and Russia aren’t allies and actuall…
That time a drunk Richard Nixon tried to nuke North Korea
The North Koreans have been provoking the United States for as long as North Koreans have been praising Kim Il-Sung for being birthed from a shooting star.
This is how powerful the Tsar Bomba would have been over America
In the heights of the Cold War, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe against his desk as he vowed to show America at the United Nation General Assembly in 1960. The following year, on October 30th, the most massive nuclear explos…
The Nazis had a nuclear reactor in World War II
The Germans were the first to propose nuclear science, and some of their top minds advanced the field in the 1800s and early 1900s. That’s why it’s probably a little surprising that America had the first functioning nuclear reactor. And the first …
These war games nearly triggered a nuclear holocaust
The great fear of nuclear weapons bombarding schools, churches, and homes in the 1980s was not one-sided. While American schoolchildren were scurrying under desks in “duck-and-cover” drills, Soviet citizens were bombarded by
That one time in 1995 when Russia almost nuked the United States
Russia almost blew the United States away with a nuclear strike in 1995 after mistakenly thinking it was under attack. If it weren’t for Russia’s then-president Boris Yeltsin, America as we know it wouldn’t exist. Under the “launch-on-warning…
Defense Department issues a new medal for Atomic-Era veterans
In the days following World War II, the United States military began to develop an entirely different way of waging war and conducting itself on the world stage. It was…
Why America built 3,000 of these simple nuclear weapons
When it comes to nuclear weapons, we hear a lot about ICBMs and SSBNs, but what is likely America’s most common nuke isn’t a missile – it’s dropped from a plane. We’re talking, of course, about the B61 gravity bomb, which has been around for a…