In 1952, an accident at Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories near Deep River, Ontario caused a partial meltdown in an experimental nuclear reactor. Hydrogen explosions followed and hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive water flooded the cor…
Even today, people can go on YouTube and watch videos of old military parades from the days of yore, when the Soviet Union was a constant threat to the United…
When you think of space-age, game-changing technology that alters battlefield operations, you probably don’t think of new train cars as the tech of the future. You also probably don’t think…
In the 1950s, America’s nuclear bomber pilots had a very valid concern about firing their weapons. In many cases, an aircrew that fired a nuclear weapon would be hard…
Homecoming for a naval vessel is a huge deal. After months at sea, the ship’s crew don their sharpest uniforms and stand on deck to catch a glimpse of their…
I was both excited and anxious the day I got my orders to Minot Air Force Base. I requested to be sent to a nuclear missile base because of the challenges and opportunities the mission presented. Every day, Airmen at Minot and its sister nuclear mis…
Anyone who survived the Cold War likely remembers the fear that, with almost no notice, an endless rain of Soviet missiles and bombs could begin that would end the war. Even if your city wasn’t hit, the number of nukes that America and Russia would…
The United States wasn’t the only country working on creating the world’s first nuclear weapon during World War II. The British had their own atomic weapons program at the beginning…
The nuclear blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan were extraordinarily powerful explosions. Their combined power yielded an equivalent of about 36,000 tons of TNT.
Only sixteen years later, the Soviets designed a bomb 3,000 times mo…
During the Cold War, the American nuclear deterrent strategy required coming up with ways to guarantee the survival of nuclear weapons if the Soviets managed a surprise first strike. The surviving devices would then be used to destroy Soviet civiliz…