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| The Nuclear Powered Bomber |
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In pursuit of what atomic energy might offer the United States Air Forces, in 1944 a program was initiated to produce an operational nuclear powered bomber.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Friday, September 03 @ 20:02:01 BST (712 reads)(Read More... | 8276 bytes more | Score: 4) |
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| Blue Peacock - The Chicken-powered Nuke |
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Conceived during the Cold War, the seven tonne device was the size of small truck and was designed to be buried or submerged by a British Army retreating from Soviet forces. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, July 31 @ 09:05:53 BST (2743 reads)(Read More... | 4542 bytes more | Score: 4.44) |
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In the final months of WWII, a jet powered flying wing made its first test flight from a remote airfield deep inside Nazi Germany. Generations ahead of its time, the Horten 229 had been designed to be a lethal high speed fighter-bomber and more importantly, virtually undetectable to Allied radar.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Wednesday, April 28 @ 20:12:43 BST (9449 reads)(Read More... | 8675 bytes more | Score: 4.83) |
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| Dead Hand - Soviet Doomsday Machine |
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Dead hand the commonly accepted name for a system developed by the former Soviet Union to allow the country to retaliate against a nation aggressor should a nuclear strike destroy or incapacitate the Soviet leadership. Such a strike is known as a nuclear decapitation.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Thursday, March 18 @ 21:07:38 GMT (9248 reads)(Read More... | 4584 bytes more | Score: 4.5) |
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50 years after the US military's nuclear testing in the Pacific ended, Marshall islanders are still living with the legacy of a decaying nuclear waste dump known as the Runit Dome.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Thursday, January 21 @ 20:47:45 GMT (13328 reads)(Read More... | 4882 bytes more | Score: 4.51) |
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On 24 January 1961, Goldsboro North Carolina, a B-52 Stratofortress carrying two multi-megaton nuclear bombs broke up in mid-air, dropping its thermonuclear payload near the tiny farming village of Faro.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Monday, November 30 @ 11:13:44 GMT (9655 reads)(Read More... | 6992 bytes more | Score: 3.88) |
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| NASA’s Lost Female Astronauts |
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In the late 1950s, the United States government contemplated training women as astronauts, and
newly released medical test results show that they were just as capable and tough as the men who
went to the moon.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, October 31 @ 06:46:24 GMT (7385 reads)(Read More... | 7587 bytes more | Score: 4.05) |
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| Was Chuck Yeager the First to Break the Sound Barrier? |
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The story of how Captain Chuck Yeager opened the throttles of the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis in
October 1947 is well known. Breaking the sound barrier was to aviation what Neil Armstrong's first step was to the space program. Yeager's name will always sit atop every list of record-breaking pilots, up there by himself in his own special stratosphere. But, was he really the first pilot to fly faster than sound?|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Wednesday, September 30 @ 07:59:18 BST (7661 reads)(Read More... | 15063 bytes more | Score: 4.48) |
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Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first manned landing moon in July 1969. While 600 million people watched on TV, Neil Alden Armstrong stepped from the LM, and set foot in the dust of Mare Tranquillitatis. The Apollo moon landings were one of the greatest achievement in human history, and have been an inspiration to all mankind for the last 40 years.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Monday, July 20 @ 20:17:40 BST (5314 reads)(Read More... | 8998 bytes more | Score: 4.71) |
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| Unit 731 - The Asian Auschwitz |
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1932, Pingfang Northern China was the home of Unit 731, the world’s first biological war complex. Masterminded by army doctor General Shiro Ishii, who believed that biological weapons were so powerful, that the normal doctrine of medicine to save lives should be reversed. Today the world is still threatened by the technology pioneered by unit 731, one of this century’s most murderous collaborations between scientists and soldiers. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Monday, June 15 @ 13:17:10 BST (13076 reads)(Read More... | 11100 bytes more | Score: 4.25) |
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| Fritz Haber - The Father of Modern Chemical Warfare |
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When WW1 broke out in 1914, the German high command were confident of an early victory. However the war quickly stagnated into a trench-bound war of attrition, before one of Germanys leading scientists Fritz Haber, offered the Fatherland a way out of the impass.
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Posted by sonicbom on Thursday, May 14 @ 12:27:45 BST (11637 reads)(Read More... | 11426 bytes more | Score: 4.72) |
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At the dawn of the atomic age, scientists began work on what might have been the nastiest weapon ever conceived. The SLAM was a failed U.S. Air Force project conceived at the height of the cold war. Although it never proceeded beyond the initial design phase, in the event of nuclear war it was intended to fly below the cover of enemy radar at supersonic speeds delivering thermonuclear warheads.
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Posted by sonicbom on Thursday, April 16 @ 19:37:52 BST (15641 reads)(Read More... | 9021 bytes more | Score: 4.58) |
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| Davy Crockett: King of the Atomic Frontier |
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On 17 July 1962, a caravan of scientists, dignitaries and VIPs such as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy gathered in Nevada to witness an historic event. They had come to observe the "Little Feller I" test shot, the final phase of Operation Sunbeam. The main attraction was a secret device bolted to the roof of an armored personnel carrier, a contraption called The Davy Crockett.
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Posted by sonicbom on Thursday, March 19 @ 16:29:34 GMT (12101 reads)(Read More... | 7735 bytes more | Score: 4.66) |
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| We Were Trapped by Radioactive Fallout |
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Bikini Atol 1954 during Operation Castle, nine scientists are caught twenty miles from ground zero when one of the the biggest thermonuclear bombs of all time was detonated. This is the amazing account of their experience...|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Monday, February 23 @ 14:51:56 GMT (13205 reads)(Read More... | 26556 bytes more | Score: 4.64) |
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January 21st 1968, a US Air Force B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed into the frozen ocean in Greenland near Thule Air Base, causing widespread radioactive contamination. Controversially, the components of only three of the four bombs could be accounted for, leaving a radioactive legacy that haunts the inhabitants of North Star Bay to this day..|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, January 17 @ 21:35:59 GMT (9798 reads)(Read More... | 7940 bytes more | Score: 4.36) |
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On 22 September 1979, a US satellite recorded a pattern of intense flashes in a remote portion of the Indian Ocean. Moments later a distant, muffled thud was overheard by the US Navy's undersea Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). Evidently something violent and explosive had transpired in the ocean off the southern tip of Africa. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Sunday, December 21 @ 09:23:17 GMT (14846 reads)(Read More... | 8615 bytes more | Score: 4.37) |
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| The Man Who Stuck His Head Inside a Particle Accelerator |
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As a 36 year old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Anatoli Bugorski used to work with the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms..|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Friday, November 28 @ 14:26:56 GMT (34500 reads)(Read More... | 3808 bytes more | Score: 4.44) |
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| Did Nazi Germany possess the Atom Bomb? |
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The very threat of a German nuclear weapon was the driving force behind the Manhattan Project, which developed the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ultimately ended the war. But how advanced was the Nazi bomb program, and how close was it to creating a usable weapon in 1945? |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Tuesday, October 21 @ 23:20:38 BST (16245 reads)(Read More... | 8124 bytes more | Score: 4.11) |
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| Vasili Arkhipov - The Man Who Saved The World |
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In 1962 at the height of the Cuban missile Crisis, a Soviet Naval ofiicer prevented the launch of a nuclear armed torpedo, and therefore a possible nuclear war. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Monday, September 29 @ 05:00:51 BST (14014 reads)(Read More... | 8630 bytes more | Score: 4.7) |
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Most kids have hobbies, but David Hahn's was slightly more exotic - atomic chemistry. While he was working on his Atomic Energy merit badge for the Boy Scouts, he built a nuclear reactor in his garden shed...|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Friday, September 05 @ 16:29:28 BST (18487 reads)(Read More... | 6990 bytes more | Score: 4.5) |
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| Mars Bluff ''Broken Arrow'' |
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On the afternoon of March 11, 1958, the children of the Gregg family were in their playhouse in the woods behind their house in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. About four o’clock they tired of the playhouse and moved 200 feet to the side yard. This kept them from becoming the first Americans killed by a nuclear weapon released on U.S. territory. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Friday, August 08 @ 11:35:15 BST (21788 reads)(Read More... | 14479 bytes more | Score: 4.67) |
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Shortly after the creation of the first atomic bombs, the US became interested in weapons with 'limited' yield that could be used tactically, rather than strategically. One of the more interesting of these developments was atomic artillery, first tested in Nevada on May 25th 1953. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Friday, July 11 @ 10:56:55 BST (14732 reads)(Read More... | 11505 bytes more | Score: 4.31) |
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| Ford Nucleon - The Atomic Car |
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During the 1950s, there was almost limitless enthusiasm for all things nuclear. There was no energy problem that the mighty atom could not tackle during that glorious and modern Atomic Age. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, June 07 @ 00:09:42 BST (12235 reads)(Read More... | 3539 bytes more | Score: 4.21) |
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Tybee Broken Arrow incident. On the 5th of February 1958 during an exercise, two U.S.A.F. planes collided resulting in the loss of a Mk-15 nuclear weapon in U.S. coastal waters off Savannah, Georgia U.S.A. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Friday, May 16 @ 15:41:46 BST (17504 reads)(Read More... | 6571 bytes more | Score: 4.65) |
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The Nedelin disaster was a launch pad accident that occurred at Baikonur Cosmodrome during the development of the Soviet R-16 ICBM. The prototype missile exploded on the launch pad, killing over 100 military personnel, including the Strategic Rocket Forces Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin in the world's worst rocketry disaster. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, April 26 @ 19:25:17 BST (18939 reads)(Read More... | 6706 bytes more | Score: 4.75) |
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| Project Orion - To Saturn by Atom bomb |
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During the 1950's, a project was set up to study the posibility of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons. Though this might seem farcical, the physics are actually sound, and small scale models using conventional explosives actually flew. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Tuesday, April 01 @ 19:38:06 BST (13795 reads)(Read More... | 6438 bytes more | Score: 4.53) |
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During the dark days of World War II, the British government took over a small island in Scotland and tested
the world's first anthrax bomb. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, March 08 @ 10:56:08 GMT (12990 reads)(Read More... | 6023 bytes more | Score: 4.72) |
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| Did nuclear fallout Kill John Wayne? |
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The tragic tale of the "The Conqueror" and the deaths of those involved in its making. The brain child of eccentric billionaire and aviator Howard Hughes, the historical epic cast John Wayne as Temujin aka Genghis Khan.|Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Saturday, February 09 @ 15:21:10 GMT (13221 reads)(Read More... | 9793 bytes more | Score: 4.38) |
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Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the Palomares Incident. A mid-air collision that caused the loss of four US hydrogen bombs in one of the most high-profile accidents involving American nuclear weapons outside the U.S. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Tuesday, January 22 @ 21:39:46 GMT (18637 reads)(Read More... | 7387 bytes more | Score: 4.55) |
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| Skydiving from the Edge Of Space |
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In the late 50's and early 60's Joseph Kittinger participated in a number of record breaking jumps from the
edge of space, setting records that stand to this day: the highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump,
longest free-fall, and fastest speed by man through the atmosphere. |Read More|
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Posted by sonicbom on Wednesday, January 16 @ 00:24:00 GMT (11366 reads)(Read More... | 5043 bytes more | Score: 4.6) |
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