The installation was America’s nuclear arsenal in the event of an atomic war with the Soviet Union. Nuclear-armed bombers and submarines used speed, countermeasures, and stealth to ensure their survival…
A public law passed last month in North Korea is a massive mood swing for a country already known for its massive swings. It lays out North Korea’s latest nuclear…
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…
In the 1960s, California highway planners were figuring out how to bypass Route 66 with a new alignment of Interstate 40. Their problem was a mountain range in the Bristols….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…