John Coster-Mullen was driving his truck to a warehouse in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when he told me that he owns uranium. He’d been talking on the phone for about hour, and I hadn’t been able to ask a single question about the project that has consumed a quarter century of his life—the reverse-engineering of America’s first…

Over the past two years, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been digitizing old, never-before-seen films of nuclear tests and uploading them to YouTube. The LLNL just uploaded a new batch of films last week, and I couldn’t help but notice that one in particular is incredibly cinematic.

By combining satellite radar with seismic data, an international team of researchers has re-assessed the effects of North Korea’s most recent nuclear test at Mount Mantap, offering disturbing new estimates for the strength of the device used and its influence on the mountain itself.

What would happen if a nuclear weapon fell in your backyard? You and everything around you would be destroyed, of course. But how many casualties would there be in the surrounding area? And what would it look like if it was a North Korean nuke versus a Russian nuke?

Film, especially science fiction, has always loved to explore the future we are most afraid of. That’s why nukes have been lighting up the screen for decades, with recent events have made the theme more timely and scarier than ever. Here are the nine most nightmare-inducing movies about nuclear attacks.

Hooray. If you live south of the Equator or in any of the countries that light up green in the map above, you’re good. Keep on living there because you don’t squat next to any nuclear weapons. But if you’re in the countries painted red—like the United States, Germany, Russia, China, India, etc.—you might live closer…

Here’s the short answer: we probably could not survive a nuclear winter. But the long answer, well, it depends on which countries are going to war, how many nukes are being dropped, and where those bombs are being detonated.

Nuclear weapons are already scary enough, but when you dig deeper and find out how powerful the weapons truly are, they get even more terrifying. The weapons we’ve built after the first atomic bombs are so strong that you can basically use Hiroshima as a unit of measurement. The largest nuclear explosion in human…

Nuclear bombs are the deadliest weapons we’ve ever created because of the destruction they’ve caused to human life and the damage they leave with radiation and the sheer magnitude of their explosions. The arms race led to more and more testing of bigger and bigger bombs. Here are the largest nuclear explosions in…

The nuclear bomb, that devastatingly powerful world killer of a weapon, has been around for 70 years. The first nuclear bomb—Trinity—was detonated in a test in New Mexico in 1945, a month later the US Army dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the world was never the same. Here’s an interesting visualization…

There have been over 2,000 nuclear explosions in real life but if we believe the movies, it seems like every other action movie drops one in for added color. And I totally get it. I hope to never see a nuclear bomb go off in person but I wouldn't mind seeing more explosive mushroom cloud visuals in my movies. They…

Little Boy, the nuclear bomb that U.S. forces dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, leveled a two-mile radius of the city, killing an estimated 80,000 people. It was an enormous amount of destruction—and it was caused by less than two percent of the uranium carried by the bomb.