From bazooka nukes to backpack A-bombs — 6 wild warheads the Cold War cooked up
In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, there were a few things you could count on: poodle skirts, sock hops, rock ’n’ roll … and the ever-present specter…
WATCH: Here’s how modern nukes compare to their grandparents
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…
This is what ICBM crews will do after a missile launch
Imagine turning the key to start the end of the world with a co-worker you may or may not actually like. That’s the job of U.S. Air Force Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Crews. There’s a good chance that after they launch their missiles, an ene…
Why the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima doesn’t have a grave
When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. But instead of b…
Why the Soviet Union wanted to nuke this hot dog stand
For around 30 years, the food court at the center of the Pentagon’s courtyard was an easy source of mid-afternoon calories for the hungry planners of a potential World War III with the Eastern Bloc. There was just one problem, and it wasn’t the fo…
The spy who gave nukes to the USSR applied for a veteran’s pension
In 1999, a U.S. Army World War II veteran applied for his Social Security pension. There would have been nothing out of the ordinary for any other vet down on his luck. He knew that any veteran of WWII was able to apply at the Social Security office…
The US plan to train nuclear suicide bomber paratroopers
It’s an idea as old as nuclear weapons themselves: If you could slip a nuke into a city and detonate it, the enemy would never know it was coming. No missiles detected, no early warning radar, just one day: BOOM. In Cold War lore, these man-portabl…
The daring sabotage raid that kept Nazis from getting The Bomb
7 times the military lost nukes (and 4 times they were never found)
The military makes a big deal out of when a rifle goes missing, not to mention when a nuke disappears. In spite of the fact the program is designed to be “zero defect,” here are 7 examples of doomsday devices wandering off (including a few wher…
Here’s how to survive a nuclear attack
The chances of a nuclear attack on the U.S. became less likely with the end of the Cold War, but with nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons in development and terrorist organizations eyeing dirty bombs, it still remains a possibility. Here are 6 steps…