Sixty years ago today—50 days after a 1.45 Megaton B28 thermonuclear bomb fell from a B-52G bomber flying over southern Spain and disappeared into the Mediterranean Sea, spurring a massive underwater search—US Ambassador to Spain Angier Biddle Duke went swimming in an effort to dispel public fears.

Over the weekend, health officials in Spain reportedly informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of a possible human case of swine flu that may have been caused by person-to-person transmission. abcnews.com/Health/human...

Billions of dollars, decades of progress spent eliminating devastating diseases may be lost with undoing of USAID. theconversation.com/billions-of-...

Special Ops To Get The Uranium

Trinity Site

Why did Trump attack Iran in 2025 & 2026 but not North Korea in 2017-2019? Free, open post for all about when & why Trump starts wars of (nuclear) choice. www.patreon.com/posts/iran-b... #PhDLife

Today in 1990, “The Hunt for Red October,” adapted from insurance salesman Tom Clancy’s bestselling 1984 first novel, opened in theaters across the United States. “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

These little drawings of proposed diagnostic experiments from Operation CASTLE (1954) fascinate me — the little "devices" (thermonuclear weapons), the palm trees, waves, the isometric views. I find "top secret art" pretty fascinating as an emergent visual genre in the 20th century...

Guess they don’t remember their “The House in the Middle” Civil Defense lessons. Light colors reflect thermal energy but dark colors absorb it. A fact that is very important for nuclear warfare survivability. Always thought that drove AF-1 lighter color scheme? Maybe not…?

MISSILE is streaming for free on Kanopy (www.kanopy.com) in the United States, along with all of Frederick Wiseman’s films. Here’s a taste (two US Air Force missileer trainees at Vandenberg Air Force Base practice the process for launching a Minuteman ICBM):

Stockpile Stewardship and Nuclear Testing: A Technical Assessment November 2025 Interesting read! Full document at link www.osti.gov/servlets/pur...

Best scientific advice I’ve seen thus far!

Interesting question

Release the hounds!🐶

75 years ago this morning, the United States conducted FOX, a proof test of a Mk-6 atomic bomb, at the Nevada Proving Ground, its fifth test there. The yield was 22 kilotons (the predicted yield was 34 kilotons). Below, the first published photographs of a mushroom cloud over Nevada, from that test.

Marines Drill on Establishing Arming, Refueling Point at remote Tinian Island in the Pacific — USNI News news.usni.org/2026/02/04/m...

A.E.C. matchbook...

70 years ago today, in a first, the USSR launched an R-5 medium-range ballistic missile (NATO designation: SS-3 Shyster) carrying a live warhead across populated areas of Kazakhstan from the Kapustin Yar test site to the Sary Shagan test range. The 0.3-kt warhead detonated on the ground near Aralsk.

There's an May 9, 1952 accident at Eielson AFB, Alaska, listed in one heavily redacted accident I have. This might be the one Hansen has listed. Again, little info on it. Note that this was declassified in 2014 — hard to know why this would still be classified!

75 yrs ago today at 5:47 AM local time, television station KTLA made an unauthorized live broadcast from atop Mt. Wilson just to Los Angeles of the 1-kiloton EASY nuclear test at the Nevada Proving Ground more than 200 miles away. It was watched by an estimated 30,000 people (start video at 22:30).

January 31, 1958: 10:48 PM EST- The United States puts its very first satellite into Earth orbit, Explorer-1. To learn more about the science around the mission here's a link to a JPL website that explains more explorer1.jpl.nasa.gov

Some of the recently declassified images of the NRO's Cold War-era JUMPSEAT HEO signals intelligence satellite program. lnkd.in/eGym2xBj

Here @joshuakeating.bsky.social points out that, as of January 14, 2026, we've entered the longest period since July 16, 1945, without a full-scale nuclear test explosion (exceeding the time between the 1998 Pakistani test and North Korea's first test in 2006) www.vox.com/future-perfe...

"W80-5 “Just Came Up,” Will Go On SLCM-N, Weapons Directors Say"

Interesting looks like some type of B61 test equipment with a unit under test.

Sandia National Laboratories Stockpile Systems Engineering

My weekly post.

An LA animal shelter is giving its longest resident her own ‘Pollypalooza' fest www.nbclosangeles.com/the-scene/la...

Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had mandates that the highways be constructed to support military applications, particularly the movement of mobile-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) nationwide. @atomicanalyst.bsky.social you posted on topic before but I can't find links?

"Wellerstein presents his story in clear, direct prose, ... 'The Most Awful Responsibility' is a well-written opus unpacking Truman’s—and America’s—complicated relationship with nuclear weapons." www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Today in 1997, Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O’Leary held her fourth Openness Initiative press conference, declassifying 6,500 previously secret nuclear test films and publishing a thorough report on radiological effluents released by nuclear tests in the United States. www.osti.gov/opennet/form...

DARPA tried to study way to turn common office buildings into large-area telescopes: www.darpa.mil/research/pro... "WITH-US" would exploit the slightly concave glass flanks of large buildings as light-collecting surfaces to look at targets in the upper atmosphere or in orbit.

“The Most Awful Responsibility” and “American Experience: Bombshell”

Jan 10, 1951 #ColdWar Plans to test atomic weapons on a closely guarded bombing range in Nevada were announced by the United States Atomic Energy Commission today. The experiments will mark the first nuclear explosions In the United States since the first atom bomb was tested in New Mexico in 1945.

Thank you to @atomicanalyst.bsky.social for his wonderful nuclear threads! And how relevant to the current situation especially given that USA ICBM silos have internet access. Irrespective, an example of how launch process is designed to be rapid & unquestioned.

Jan 11, 1941 NYT Suppression of the motion picture "Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles's first film venture, has been demanded of RKO Pictures, by representatives of William Randolph Hearst. Welles said: "It is not based upon the life of Hearst or any one else. #TCMparty www.nytimes.com/1941/01/11/a...

Lots of discussions into the "French problem" in this early article of mine on atomic patenting practices — was a complicated situation relating to IP, the Quebec Agreement, and Groves' distrust of the French... alexwellerstein.com/publications...

Executive briefing study: When FDR abruptly died Truman needed to be briefed on massive secret Manhattan Project. Fascinating to explore its size, style, & content Memorandum for the Secretary of War from General L. R. Groves, “Atomic Fission Bombs,” April 23, 1945 nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...

Aldrich Ames, C.I.A. Turncoat Who Helped the Soviets, Dies at 84 www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/o...

I had a really fun time working on the code that was used to make these fallout visualizations for this USA Today article. I will soon be incorporating some of it into the NUKEMAP and probably making a version of this "mass attack fallout mapper" for public use. www.usatoday.com/graphics/int...

Watch tonight on PBS (9 PM eastern, 8 PM central) and PBS Passport:

Incredible how little attention this is getting outside Germany. "In its third full day, a ... power failure in Berlin resulting from an arson attack...tens of thousands...making do without heat, electricity, cellphone service & warm food or drinks." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/w...

#WWII General Brett's B-17 "Swoose" is the oldest surviving B-17 and the only D model in existence and carried several famous passengers including Lyndon B Johnson. Damaged Jan 11, 1942. It's currently being restored at the United States Air Force Museum. www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum...

At 4:50 AM today in 1958, 32 cars of a 78-car eastbound train carrying assembled nuclear bomb casings loaded with high explosives from the Atomic Energy Commission’s nuclear weapons assembly plant in Burlington, Iowa, derailed on Nickel Plate Road near Hamburg, New York, ~15 miles south of Buffalo.

Tonight in 1961, the experimental SL-1 reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station near Idaho Falls, Idaho, accidentally went prompt critical and exploded during a routine reactor restart maintenance procedure, killing operators John Byrnes (22), Richard Legg (26), and Richard McKinley (27).

I stumbled across this first-hand account of a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site from 1957 and couldn’t stop reading it. So I put it up on DOOMSDAY MACHINES. Something to ring in the New Year with, perhaps… doomsdaymachines.net/p/zero-time-...

Yummys

(NUMEC) Nuclear Materials and Equipment Company of Apollo, Pennsylvania had surprisingly high loses of highly enriched uranium (the most ever by a company ) rumor has it they diverted HEU to covert nuclear weapons program run secretly by another nation state.

A forgotten chapter: The stories of Allied POWs in Nagasaki during the atomic bombing.