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Demon Core
Canadian physicist Louis Slotin and other scientists were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting an experiment that involved creating a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the same plutonium core. -
Baneberry Blast
The Nevada Test Site is a U.S. Department of Energy reservation located in southeastern Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles northwest of the city of Las Vegas. The site was established for the testing of nuclear devices on January 11, 1951. It is composed of approximately 1,350 sq mi (3,500 km2) of desert and mountainous terrain. Between 1951 and 1992, there were a total of 928 announced nuclear tests at Nevada Test Site, which included 828 underground explosions. -
Windscale Fire
In 1946, the Second World War ended and the United States government passed legislation that removed all nuclear weapons programs in other countries. Many British scientists participated in the Manhattan Project, and the British government did not want to be left behind in the nuclear arms race, so they created a nuclear weapons program. Nuclear reactors were constructed near the tiny village of Seascale, Cumberland, and were known as Windscale Pile 1 and Windscale Pile 2. The facilities prod -
Tybee Island B-47 Crash
An American B-47 bomber was sent on a simulated combat mission over the United States. The plane left from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida and was carrying a single 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 hydrogen bomb. The Mark 15 nuclear bomb was the first relatively lightweight thermonuclear bomb created by the United States. At about 2:00 AM, the B-47 bomber collided with an F-86 plane over Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, USA. -
Goldsboro B-52 Crash
An American B-52 bomber was on a 24-hour airborne alert mission over the Atlantic seaboard. The aircraft was carrying two Mark 39 nuclear weapons onboard. During the mission, the B-52 was scheduled to meet with a tanker for mid-air refueling. While the plane was being refueled, the B-52 captain, Major W.S. Tullock, was notified that his aircraft had a leak in its port wing fuel cell. -
Palomares B-52 Crash
On January 17, 1966, an American B-52 bomber embarked on a mission from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. The aircraft was carrying four Type B28 hydrogen bombs. The mission was part of the Cold War U.S. Operation Chrome Dome. The plane was scheduled to travel east across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea towards the European borders of the Soviet Union. -
stanislav Petrov
Stanislav Petrov is a retired lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. During the Cold War, Petrov worked at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow. The bunker housed the command center of the Soviet early warning system, code-named Oko. Petrov’s job included observing the satellite early warning network and notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union. -
Chernobyl Disaster
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in modern day Ukraine. On April 26, 1986, operators at the power plant conducted a scheduled test on the electric control system of one of the nuclear reactors. For an amount of time the reactors safety system was turned off. The reactor was also operating under improper and unstable conditions. These factors, along with faulty actions of some operators, caused an uncontrollable power surge to oc -
Soviet submarine k-129
The K-219 submarine was a ballistic missile sub used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It carried 16 missiles equipped with an estimated 34 nuclear warheads. On October 3, 1986, the submarine was on patrol 680 miles (1,090 km) northeast of Bermuda when the seal in one of the missile hatch covers failed. This allowed seawater to leak into the missile tube and react with residue from the missile’s liquid fuel, producing nitric acid. The K-219 suffered a subsequent explosion and fire in -
Castle Bravo
Bikini Atoll is an atoll in one of the Micronesian Islands in the Pacific Ocean, part of Republic of the Marshall Islands. It consists of 23 islands surrounding a central lagoon. As part of the Pacific Proving Grounds, Bikini Atoll was the site of more than 20 nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1958. Castle Bravo was the code name given to the first U.S. test of a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. The test was performed on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. The nuclear