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Roll of raffle tickets labeled "National Security Priority"

How Everything Became National Security

And national security became everything.
Hands manipulating the earth like a Rubik's cube.

When the C.I.A. Messes Up

Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.
A column of Soviet armored vehicles arrives to reinforce the military presence in Kabul on Jan. 30, 1980.

The Forgotten World War III Scare of 1980

Moscow and Washington trapped themselves in a cycle of fear over Iran.
Still from Pretty Poison (1968).

The All-American Crack-Up in 1960s Hollywood Cinema

Starting in the 1960s, more and more Hollywood films depicted an increasingly violent and alienated American society quickly losing its mind.
Pope Francis.

Whatever Happened to the Language of Peace?

Pope Francis is the only world leader who seems prepared to denounce war.
The Chesapeake 1000 crane at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point, Md., on Friday.

A Crane with Cold War CIA Origins Will Help the Baltimore Bridge Cleanup

The Chesapeake 1000, which can lift 1,000 tons, arrived in Baltimore on Friday. Decades ago, it helped build a ship for a CIA mission to recover Soviet secrets.

The Annotated Oppenheimer

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
US National Security council meets in 1967

How LBJ Forged the US-Israel Alliance

The special relationship between the United States and Israel was cemented by the support offered by Lyndon B. Johnson throughout the sixties.
Operatives using air defense systems.

The Two Chomskys

The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?
Japanese prime minister and minister of war Hideki Tojo on trial in 1947.

Japan’s Incomplete Reckoning With World War II Crimes

Gary Bass’s new book asks why the tribunal in Tokyo after World War II was so ineffective.
George Kennan sitting at his desk.

George Kennan, Loser

The American foreign policy sage was driven as much by pessimism about the US as antipathy to the Soviet Union.
Major General Groves and J. R. Oppenheimer view the base of the steel tower used for the first atomic bomb test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on Sept. 11, 1945.

A New, Chilling Secret About the Manhattan Project Has Just Been Made Public

Turns out Oppenheimer’s boss lied, repeatedly, about radiation poisoning.
Still from the film 'Oppenheimer.'

‘It’s Really First-Class Work’

Watching 'Oppenheimer' with the author of a definitive account of the Manhattan Project.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Cry Baby Scientist": What Oppenheimer the Film Gets Wrong about Oppenheimer the Man

The so-called "father of the bomb" helped bring us prematurely into the age of existential risk.
Grafitti reading "no mines."

The Navajo Suffered From Nuclear Testing. 'Oppenheimer' Doesn't Tell Our Story

We must recognize the continued suffering and sacrifice of the Navajo that built the atomic era.
J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer, Nullified and Vindicated

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.
Castro and Kruschev.
partner

Putin’s Nuclear Threats Evoke Cold War Tensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Russia’s recent nuclear threats have revived Cold War animosity with roots in the Cuban missile crisis.
Photos of UFO and the Chinese Spy Balloon.

Why Americans Are So Unsettled by the Chinese Spy Balloon

China’s balloon, whatever its purpose, became a physical and observable reminder of the often-invisible work nations do to keep tabs on one another.
The door and interior tunnel of the Nantucket fallout shelter.

Inside JFK's Secret Doomsday Bunker

The president's Nantucket nuclear fallout shelter could become a National Historic Landmark—but efforts to preserve its history have stalled.
J. Robert Oppenheimer.

J. Robert Oppenheimer Cleared of “Black Mark” Against His Name After 68 Years

Manhattan Project physicist was infamously stripped of his security clearance in 1954.
People watching uranium mill waste blow in the wind.

The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater

A catalog of cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons, where polluted water and sickness were often left behind.
Black and white photo of Pruitt-Igoe buildings being destroyed.

Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the "Atomic Cloud"

In the 1950s, the U.S. military conducted unethical radiological experiments on Black communities, including the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex.
Dry cracked, barren land at dawn, the former bed of the Salton Sea, 2019.

The Toxic History of the Salton Sea

A new book catalogs the alarming events that created one of the West’s most polluted bodies of water.
Black and white photo of D-Day Normandy Landings

For the Anniversary of D-Day - Blitzkrieg Manquée? Or, a New Mode of "Firepower War"?

Why and how did D-Day succeed? The question has given postwar historians no peace.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US secretary of state James Baker in the Kremlin, Moscow, February 9, 1990.

‘A Bridge Too Far’

Even the most ardent advocates of NATO expansion after the implosion of the USSR realized that it had limits—and one of those limits was Ukraine.
Checkpoint Charlie, seen from West Berlin in 1960.

The Disastrous Return of Cold War Strategy

Hal Brands urges the U.S. to make China and Russia “pay exorbitantly” for their policies. History shows that has never worked.
From left, Vincent Hallinan, Charlotta Bass and Paul Robeson in California in August 1952
partner

Black Internationalism Is the Antidote to America’s Love of War

How Charlotta Bass, a Black woman and peace activist, anticipated America’s path to militarism.
Comic of a boy inside an atom structure while a man looks on.

The Surprising History of the Comic Book

Since their initial popularity during World War II, comic books have always been a medium for American counterculture and for nativism and empire. 
Illustration of burning cannabis with helicopters overhead

The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again?

Somewhere in Jamaica survive the original cannabis strains that were not burned by American agents or bred to be more profitable.
The picture is a photo collage of three men against the background of an atomic bomb explosion. Pictured from left to right is Ed Hall, Ted Hall, and former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

One Brother Gave the Soviets the A-Bomb. The Other Got a Medal.

J. Edgar Hoover had both of them in his sights. Yet neither one was ever arrested. The untold story of how the Hall brothers beat the FBI.

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