During World War II, few working on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb had a good understanding of the effect of nuclear radiation. Before 1963, it was common to conduct nuclear tests ...

On December 10, 1961, a three-to-five-kiloton hydrogen bomb exploded underground approximately 25 miles southeast of Carlsbad. Six years later, another subsurface nuclear detonation, this one ...

The Plowshare program was both a public relations ploy and a serious scientific study. It was an attempt to see if nuclear bombs could be used in peaceful constructive ways. If it had been successful, ...

The 1962 Sedan nuclear explosion. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Fifty-five years ago this month, Milo Nordyke was staring out at the Nevada desert, waiting for a huge explosion to blow a hole in the ...

Usually, if you are listening to people debate about nuclear issues, it is one of two topics: how to deal with nuclear weapon stockpiles or if we want nuclear power plants in our backyard. But there ...

not so long ago, the U.S. government, led by gung-ho scientists, seriously considered exploding 300 or more atomic bombs to blast a sea-level canal in Panama? Or up to 764 in northern Colombia?

In the late 1950s Paul Sears, director of the nation’s first graduate program in conservation, was called upon to join a special committee of leading scientists and engineers to advise the U.S. Atomic ...

After ten years of beating, Congress last week transformed a monster sword into something faintly resembling a plowshare. It was the War Department’s $160,000,000 project on the Tennessee River at ...