Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Nuclear Weapons
American leaders called the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki our 'least abhorrent choice,' but there were alternatives to the nuclear attacks.
A final interview with the most controversial father of the atomic age, Edward Teller
Stationed near Nagasaki at the close of the war, a young photographer ventured into the devastated city and stayed for months.
THE BIG BANG
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1952, ON the island of Elugelab in Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission detonated the world’s first thermonuclear explosion.
In his last speech as president, he inaugurated the spirit of the 1960s.
Whatever the calendars say, in some figurative sense, America’s 1950s ended, and the 1960s began, on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D.
The strangest of all Cold War relics also offers a clue to why we won it.
How the U.S. Air Force came to drop an A-bomb on South Carolina
Growing up on a Cold War air base in the shadow of the big one
“Do you realize there are 1500 babies born a month in SAC?” says Jimmy Stewart, playing a B-36 pilot in the 1954 film Strategic Air Command. I was raised among those babies.
‘Who’s next?” sang Tom Lehrer in his darkly funny Cold War ballad about nuclear proliferation. We’re still asking.
It all seemed familiar: the sobering headline, the quick survey of responses from Washington and other capitals, then the solemn editorial assessments of the meaning of it all.
Twice a year. hundreds of people make a pilgrimage to the spot where the nuclear age began.
A life-long student of military history and affairs says that nuclear weapons have made the idea of war absurd. And it is precisely when everyone agrees that war is absurd that one gets started.
Edward Luttwak is the author of nine books on the art of war, and he pronounces with startling confidence on a great array of events, as the titles of his works suggest.
The fallout-shelter craze of 1961
It all began on the evening of July 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy went before television cameras to explain to his countrymen the grave meaning and still graver consequences of the deepening crisis over Berlin.
The Agony of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the life of J.
An American Success Story
A dreadful prospect opened up for mankind when Napoleon’s Grande Armée won the battle of Austerlitz and swept on to conquer all of Europe.
“Almost every time a serious disarmament effort got under way, it barely managed to move forward an inch or two before a great world cataclysm intervened”
As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh.
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