Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell—on North Carolina
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Sixty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, a B-52 bomber disintegrated over a small Southern town. An eyewitness recalls what happened next…
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Decades Later, Sickness Among Airmen After a Hydrogen Bomb Accident
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It was a late winter night in 1966 and a fully loaded B-52 bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol had collided with a refueling jet high over the Spanish coast, freeing four hydrogen bombs that went tumbling toward a farming village called Palomares…
Read MoreAtomic Veterans Were Silenced for 50 Years. Now, They’re Talking.
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Nearly everyone who’s seen it and lived to tell the tale describes it the same way: a horrifying, otherworldly thing of ghastly beauty that has haunted their life ever since.
“The colors were beautiful,” remembers a man in Morgan Knibbe’s short documentary The Atomic Soldiers. “I hate to say that.”
“It was completely daylight at midnight—brighter than the brightest day you ever saw,” says another.
Read MoreThe Nuclear Sins of the Soviet Union Live on in Kazakhstan
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Much of what’s known about the health impacts of radiation comes from studies of acute exposure — for example, the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan or the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Studies of those events provided grim lessons on the effects of high-level exposure, as well as the lingering impacts on the environment and people who were exposed. Such work, however, has found little evidence that the health effects are passed on across generations.
Read MoreNuclear Waste from North Korea Dumped Near Taiwan
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TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – An Italian businessman dumped radioactive nuclear waste in the ocean near Taiwan in the 1990s, according to documents from an Italian intelligence service declassified Wednesday.
Read MoreFlash from the past: Why an apparent Israeli nuclear test in 1979 matters today
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At a time when the Iran agreement is in the headlines and other Middle Eastern countries—notably Saudi Arabia—are making noises about establishing their own programs for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, it is worth giving renewed scrutiny to an event that occurred 36 years ago: a likely Israeli-South African nuclear test over the ocean between the southern part of Africa and the Antarctic.
Read MoreDozens of nuclear blunders ‘ignored’
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The nuclear safety regulator has been accused of turning a blind eye to dozens of serious mistakes at power plants and military bases.
A torpedo inadvertently fired by a Navy warship at the nuclear submarine dock in Plymouth and three road accidents involving vehicles carrying radioactive material were among the events dismissed as posing no danger.
Read MorePressing Issues: When U.S. Troops Were Exposed to Atomic Bomb in Japan
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I've posted dozens of pieces about the atomic bombing (before and after) of Japan in August 1945. Here's a story, from my book Atomic Cover-Up, on what happened, weeks later, when the first U.S. troops arrived.
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