nuclear weapons

North Korea confirms third nuclear test

North Korea conducted its third nuclear weapons test this evening, the country's official news agency said, and apparently the blast had a higher explosive yield than the earlier tests.

The 5.1-magnitude artificial tremor (initially measured at magnitude 4.9) struck before noon Tuesday local time in North Hamgyong Province. Initially, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok told Bloomberg it was "likely" a nuclear test, adding that more investigation was necessary. Meanwhile, a U.N. Security Council diplomat said the seismic activity was the result of a nuclear test.

The Korean Central News Agency later … Read more

Hackers steal and publish e-mails from U.N. nuclear agency

Hackers have made their way into one of the servers of the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency, according to Reuters. The agency confirmed that the hackers stole information and published it online.

"The IAEA deeply regrets this publication of information stolen from an old server that was shut down some time ago," agency spokesperson Gill Tudor told Reuters. "The IAEA's technical and security teams are continuing to analyze the situation and do everything possible to help ensure that no further information is vulnerable."

A group that calls itself "Parastoo" claimed responsibility … Read more

Rare footage captures real sound of 1953 A-bomb blast

Odds are that not many folks out there have seen a nuclear explosion up close. And it turns out that most of the films we've seen are dubbed or contain stock blast sound effects, a point I wasn't aware of before coming across a blog curated by Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics.

Most films of nuclear explosions got dubbed. If they do contain an actual audio recording of the test blast itself (something I'm often suspicious of -- I suspect many were filmed silently and have a stock blast sound … Read more

How Nevada became America's Nuclear Age ground zero

MERCURY, Nev. -- From the side that faced away from the blast, you might never even have bothered to look at this concrete dome. But walk around the other side, and there's no question something extraordinary happened here.

Welcome to the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site. As part of Road Trip 2012, I've come to visit this 1,375-square-mile expanse of harsh desert and even harsher mountains that begins about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. Here, from 1951 through 1992, a total of 928 nuclear weapons exploded, many of them sending … Read more

Nukemap: Shall we play a game?

Want to play god much?

With Nukemap, a new tool that lets anyone test out--on a Google Map--the effects of some of history's most famous nuclear explosions on cities around the world, you can.

Say you're inclined to see just how bad the destruction would be in London if "Fat Man," the second A-bomb dropped on Japan by the Americans during World War II, detonated there. Nukemap lays it all out for you.

Nukemap lets you choose from a long list of cities to experiment with--or drag the map's marker wherever you want--and then choose either a custom yield in kilotons, or one of a list of famous bombs. When you click the "detonate" button, you quickly see a map with a series of colored circles that show the radii of the fireball, the air blast, the spread of radiation, and the spread of thermal radiation. … Read more

Nearly 70 computers missing from Los Alamos nuclear lab

U.S. officials are investigating the disappearance of 67 computers from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico, according to a nonprofit group that exposes government misconduct.

Of the missing computers, 13 were lost or stolen in the past year, including 3 taken from a scientist's home last month. A BlackBerry belonging to another worker was lost in a "sensitive foreign country," according to an internal Los Alamos Lab e-mail posted online by the Project On Government Oversight.

The group also posted a letter from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration rebuking the … Read more