In the aftermath of the Second World War, it quickly became evident to the British government that Americans had no intention of sharing their newly acquired nuclear weapons technology despite the UK’s assistance in the Manhattan Project. As such the British government set about building its own atomic arsenal which eventually led to the UK’s worst nuclear meltdown in history.
The thought of mutually assured destruction in the form of worldwide nuclear annihilation made leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain squeamish. But, limited nuclear war, now there was a plan! Irradiating the Soviets just a little bit, you know, as a deterrent, was seen as the clearly superior option to outright ICBM volleys.
A perverse fascination with nuclear fallout and blast radii isn’t that weird. Don’t you want to know how hard you and everything you know is going to disappear from the face of the Earth in the unlikely case that some maniac drops twenty kilotons of atomic death on your front door? Now you can see a simulation of the mushroom cloud that will claim your life—in three dimensions.
The first people to step on to the surface of Mars won’t arrive aboard the chemical-fueled rockets that delivered Apollo 11 to the Moon—they simply don’t provide enough thrust to get to the Red Planet before exposing their crews to months of dangerous space radiation. Instead, NASA is turning to long-ignored nuclear-thermal rocket technology to deliver the first Martian explorers into history. More »
Most of us are content keeping hackers away with a firewall and decent password. But the Pentagon isn’t nearly content, and in a new report, insists we should keep our nuclear arsenal ready for Internet retaliation. What could go wrong? More »
On July 16, 1945, the US Army destroyed a small part of New Mexico by testing the first nuclear bomb in human history, the most powerful weapon of all time. It then proceeded to blow up 1,054 more. More »
Scientists have given some thought as to how we’ll defend ourselves when a giant asteroid inevitably heads our way and solutions range from paintballs to nukes. A team at Iowa State University has settled on the latter, and they’ve got plans for a ship that can do it waiting in the wings. More »
Sixty five years ago today, the Department of Defense launched a nuclear missile test in Nevada, as they would hundreds of times again. But this time, five guys and a cameraman were placed right underneath the massive atomic explosion. Why? More »