The surviving inhabitants of a Soviet-era town in northeastern Kazakhstan where 456 bombs were detonated on their doorstep, have revealed the devastating impact the explosions had on their health, with cancer spiking along with severe birth defects.
Filmmakers Thomas Brag and Staffan Taylor ventured to Kurchatov, which was a top secret town established in 1947 as the headquarters of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program. At the time, it was not even visible on maps due to the high level
The world needs urgent regulations to prevent the ‘Wild West’ space resources race from spiralling out of control in to war, a British expert who worked on NASA’s Mars mission has warned.
Several countries have recently set their sights on the Moon, which is a multi-quadrillion-pound hotbed of unearthed riches from rare Earth metals used in smartphones to helium that could perhaps provide an invaluable source of energy.
But there has been unease among scientists about how the moon’s resources
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A brief hubbub erupted in Washington this week over an unspecified “national security threat” that some sources now believe is related to a Russian plan to use nuclear weapons in space. The prospect is cause for concern but not panic.
First, here are four
With a deadly conflict in the Middle East, Russia still waging its invasion of Ukraine and China on the brink of invading Taiwan, the world has arguably not been this close to war in a century.
But while Americans are on the other side of the globe, the US would not be safe from a nuclear war, experts warn.
Russia has an arsenal of more than 5,900 warheads capable of reaching the US in about 30 minutes. At the
Once a bustling town with more than 4,500 residents and its own newspaper, Jeffrey City in Wyoming is a shadow of its former self with forlorn buildings left to rust and sprigs of grass breaking up tarmacked surfaces – but 24 residents refuse to let it go to ground completely.
The rural enclave started out as a single homestead but after uranium was discovered in the area, a mine opened in 1957 and a drove of workers from across the
NASA has spent seven years trying to prevent Bennu — an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building and named after ancient Egypt’s fiery bird-god — from crashing cataclysmically into Earth.
While Bennu’s chances of impact are just 1-in-2,700, more than five times a person’s chance of being struck by lightning, NASA’s team nevertheless has categorized it as one of the two ‘most hazardous known asteroids.’
In a worst-case scenario, the roughly 510-meter wide, carbon-based behemoth would smash into Earth
LONDON — Fancy losing sleep tonight? Just read the U.K. government’s list of all the massive threats it believes are currently facing the U.K.
The U.K. government’s National Risk Register, unveiled Thursday by Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, sets out key vulnerabilities and threats to the country. And it reveals previously classified information about the U.K. government’s thinking in a bid to encourage firms to up their mitigation strategies.
The register details a total of 89 risks that meet the
Rarely have so few, seemingly inconsequential words generated so many consequential ones.
In a mere 109-word paragraph tucked away in an autobiographical collection of interviews published in 2000, just as he ascended to power in Russia, Vladimir Putin tells a nightmarish tale: Once, when he and his friends were chasing rats with sticks in the dilapidated apartment building in St. Petersburg where he grew up, a “huge rat” he’d cornered suddenly “lashed around and threw itself at” him, chasing the
If Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Moscow’s invasion captures Russian territory, there would be no alternative to using strategic nuclear weapons, Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev warned on Sunday.
“There would simply be no other way out” of using nuclear weapons if the Ukrainian offensive succeeded in taking Russian territory, Medvedev, former Russian president and current National Security Council deputy chairman, said in a post on social media.
“Just imagine that the NATO-supported ukrobanderovtsy’s offensive turned out successful, and they took away
In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly
