It didn't take long. In the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the "victory weapon," the atomic bomb, on two Japanese cities in August 1945, American fears and fantasies ran wild.
Imagine you're an historian 100 years from now -- assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious -- and you're looking back at what's happening today. You'd see something quite remarkable.
After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, nuclear weapons did, too -- without going away. The American and Russian arsenals, and the nuclear geography that underlay them, remained in place, just largely unremarked upon. In the meantime, the weaponry itself spread.
According to former basketball champion Dennis Rodman who recently visited Pyongyang, all Kim wants is for President Barack Obama to call him. Why? Apparently, he is more worried about a threat from China than he is from the U.S.
If you are looking forward to seeing Channing Tatum in the new movie G.I. Joe: Retaliation, don't get to the theater late or you'll miss him.
Phantom is a submarine movie based on a set of true facts. It concerns the sinking of a Russian submarine and the suppositions about how it came to happen.
The most terrifying thing about the mothballed missile silo in South Dakota is that it's just sitting there, right off Exit 116 on Interstate 90, a fe...
Eons away from that threatening morning in Manhattan, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis continues to stay in plain sight. It provokes an existential question: Can time run out?
Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, November is the month of the Dead Kennedy. It's a time of remembering a day of blood and brains on a pink dre...
Writer/director Sally Potter has switched the shift typical of films set in the 1960s from personal and sexual enlightenment to stone-still disillusionment in Ginger and Rosa, which begins with the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima.
Of all the challenges facing the human race in the 21st Century, climate change and nuclear annihilation stand alone.
Fifty years ago this week, much changed for me, my family and the rest of America. As a nation and a world, we had stared down the barrel of nuclear destruction. However, it seems clear that 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis we are not much closer to banishing the threat of nuclear war.
In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev's willingness to accept Kennedy's hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
A recent cover of the Economist showed a picture of a few small islands and asks "Could China and Japan really go to war over these?" There are many reasons to believe that this conflict will not escalate into a war, or at least, not a wide-ranging one.
While being able to create a black hole, or recreate the Big Bang with the Hadron Collider sounds like super fun experiments, what if we're really able to create a black hole in an underground laboratory in Switzerland?
Now, on a planet still overstocked with city-busting, world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used, the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about is one that doesn't exist: Iran's.
Even a so-called "small" nuclear war would have huge and devastating consequences for people living nowhere near it
In this project I examine the history behind American perception of human extinction. I explore how existential risk has shaped foreign policy by tracing the domestic debate over nuclear war and ozone depletion.
Our own success as a species has created new a terrifying risks that didn't exist a few decades ago. By our dominating presence on the planet, we are in danger of upsetting climate systems in ways we don't fully understand.
Nations with nuclear material -- whether military or civilian -- must secure and eliminate stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. The threat of nuclear terror is not just possible, it is quite plausible; if effective action is not taken, over time, it is probable.
Tensions remain. But one reason why Monday's meeting between Netanyahu and Obama ended with less rancor than did their last tete-a-tete is that Israel is growing more comfortable with U.S. policy -- secret U.S. policy.
When our arrogance makes us ignorant to the horror that is war -- WWIII will have begun. Recall with humility, then, that WWI and WWII killed 20 million and 60 million respectively and wounded many millions more.
WASHINGTON -- A top Republican senator made a strong case for military action against Iran Monday night, calling the Obama administration's policy of ...
Republican presidential candidates' extreme comments about economics and culture have dominated headlines, but lurking in the shadows is a hawkish Cold War mentality. Gingrich, Romney and Santorum want to beef up the military and put nuclear weapons back on the table.
Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential hopeful, wants you to know that as commander in chief he is ready to confront one of the most nightmarish o...
