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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Cold War History

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Atomic Veterans 1946-1962
June 17, 2019
From 1946 to 1962, the United States conducted about 200 atmospheric nuclear tests–more than the other nuclear states put together at that time.[1] Approximately 400,000 servicemen in the US Army, Navy, and Marines were present during these atmospheric tests,[2] whether as witnesses to the tests themselves or as post-test cleanup crews. At that time, many […]
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Atomic Veterans: Enewetak Atoll
The Marshall Islands in the Pacific were subjected to 67 nuclear tests from 1946 to 1958.[1] Some of the most notable operations included Operation Crossroads, which examined the effects of nuclear explosions on Navy ships; Operation Greenhouse, which focused on reducing the size and weight of an atomic bomb and decreasing the amount of fissile […]
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Nth Country Experiment
March 1, 2019
Could any country with the right knowledge and technology build a nuclear bomb? From May 1964 to April 1967, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (the predecessor to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) set out to answer this question. The Laboratory hired three physicists who only recently received their Ph.Ds in […]
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Nuclear Testing in Mississippi
December 10, 2018
After nine years of negotiations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) in 1963, which prohibited “any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion” “in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water, including waters or high seas.”[i] This treaty, […]
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The Korean War
August 24, 2018
The Korean War was a three-year struggle with ongoing political, social, and economic ramifications. From 1950 to 1953, the small Korean peninsula became the stage for one of the largest Cold War proxy wars. China and North Korea, aided by the Soviet Union, fought against the United States, South Korea, and an array of other countries […]
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Proxy Wars During the Cold War: Africa
After World War II, the tension between communist and democratic forms of government strained relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and provided the ideological underpinnings of the Cold War. These tensions almost boiled over into full on conflict several times, especially as nuclear arms proliferation and testing advanced rapidly during the late […]
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Reagan and Gorbachev: The Reykjavik Summit
August 7, 2018
The Reykjavík Summit, held on October 11 and 12, 1986, was the second meeting of US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Following up on the previous year’s Geneva Summit, Reagan and Gorbachev continued to work toward and debate the possible terms of nuclear arms reduction at Reykjavík. The two leaders did […]
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Atomic Age Design
August 1, 2018
The development of nuclear weapons had a notable impact on many aspects of American culture, including design. Spanning the late 1940s through about 1960, Atomic Age design is characterized by references and responses to nuclear science and the atomic bomb. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States underwent a period of mass […]
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Reagan and Gorbachev: The Geneva Summit
July 26, 2018
The Geneva Summit, the first meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, was held on November 19 and 20, 1985. The two leaders met to discuss the Cold War-era arms race, primarily the possibility of reducing the number of nuclear weapons. Hosted in Geneva, Switzerland, the meeting was the first […]
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Camp Century
July 19, 2018
During the Cold War, the U.S. Army built a military complex under the Greenland ice sheet as a prototype for nuclear missile silos.