President Donald Trump announced the other day that the United States will abandon a treaty, originally signed with the Soviet Union, designed to prevent the deployment of the exact sort of missiles that scare the bejeezus out of world leaders.

Sandia National Labs is involved in some pretty intense science. Researchers there mainly focus on developing and researching non-nuclear components for America’s arsenal and have been, in some fashion, since Truman was president. They are experts in the delicate art of things that blow up.

Nukes are the most unforgiving, most horrifying specter of death that humanity has ever devised. Virtually nothing can survive their vaporizing combination of heat, blast effects, and gamma-ray radiation. Nothing, that is, except the windshield of a Tesla Semi. We’d sure like to test that.

Last week, CIA director Mike Pompeo said North Korea could only be “months away” from having the ability to hit the United States with a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile. Speaking at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Pompeo said America needs to behave with the knowledge that North Korea is…

It took President Donald Trump 55 minutes of a one-hour meeting last week to argue with aides that he didn’t want to re-certify America’s nuclear deal with Iran—an Obama-era deal he roundly condemned on the campaign trail—only to capitulate in the last five, The New York Times is reporting. Problem for Trump is that…

The Cold War is over. And so is the need for America’s land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Not only are the costs of maintaining 450 Minuteman-III missiles unsustainable, keeping them in the nuclear arsenal is hardly practical. Maintaining hundreds of outdated, budget-draining Minuteman-IIIs when the…

They move at more than five times the speed of sound and can maneuver in unpredictable patterns previously unthinkable at high velocities. They’re nearly impossible to stop. And they can carry thermonuclear payloads. In the relentless global arms race, maneuverable hypersonic weapons look like the next step.

Dismantling the world’s 15,000 nuclear weapons is one the most important geopolitical challenges humanity faces. That number seems bleak, given the current state of affairs. But if you wanted to dismantle just one warhead, here is what it would take.

You rarely—if ever—hear “South Africa” and “nuclear weapons” mentioned in the same breath. That’s, of course, because South Africa doesn’t have any nukes. But the history behind why it is the only country to have ever built its own nuclear weapons, and then voluntarily relinquished them, reveals what motivates a…

Earlier this morning, the Hanford Site—which is where the United States produced most of its plutonium for nuclear weapons, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki—declared an emergency. Considering all the horrible stuff still contained within America’s most contaminated nuclear site, that did not sound good. But in a…

Russia has deployed 215 more nuclear warheads than allowed by the New START treaty, setting itself up to violate a provision that goes into effect next year. Surely this will end well.

The Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned complex that produced plutonium for most of the weapons in the United States nuclear arsenal, including the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. It’s also the most contaminated nuclear site in the entire country. A tunnel just collapsed there, and a state of emergency has…

If a nuclear bomb lands on your head, you will not survive. You just won’t. But if you do survive, the military just held an enormous 6,000-person strong exercise, named Guardian Response, on what to do in the aftermath. And the pictures released by the U.S. Army Forces Command perfectly depict your coming…

The Pentagon has disputed a report by NBC News claiming the United States is planning a preventative strike against North Korea if it decides to conduct another nuclear weapons test. However, reports early Friday morning indicate the U.S. is in fact assessing military options against North Korea, and North Korean…

A new “super-fuze” device incorporated into submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads are so deadly and accurate that they could possibly wipe out an entire fleet of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in their silos, creating a preemptive strike-first capability that would give Russia little time…

One week after North Korea launched four ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan, the United States has announced it is permanently deploying attack drones to South Korea for the first time.

South Korea is getting closer to hosting the controversial Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, with equipment arriving on its soil recently for the aim of shooting down short-, medium- and intermediate-range missiles in their terminal phase. But the real story is that the Pentagon has been launching…

Yesterday U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed that America’s nuclear arsenal must be at the “top of the pack.” For the record, America is already a leading nuclear power, but Trump has made so many ill-informed and flat-out wrong comments about nukes that his words should come as no surprise. The fact is, most…

I know you don’t ever want to think about what will happen if a nuclear weapon heads your way. Pretty much, you’d fucking die. But the kind folks over at AsapSCIENCE put together a handy video of how you’ll get there.

On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump showed an alarming lack of understanding about U.S. nuclear weapon policy or how devastating the weapons could be if used. Now that he’s in power, U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu and Senator Edward J. Markey of California and Massachussetts, respectively, introduced a bill that…