Sometimes inventions save countless lives. Sometimes they end just as many. Sometimes, they do both. The United States dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on Aug. 6, 1945. The olive-green steel cylinder called “Little Boy” exploded above Hiroshima,

Nuclear reactors and atomic bombs both rely on nuclear fission, but does that mean that a reactor could turn into an atomic bomb in the right circumstances?

Tanaka Terumi was thirteen years old when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, in August, 1945. The blast knocked him unconscious. After he came to, he and his mother walked through the city’s “blackened ruins”—buildings zapped to ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Jul 16, 2025, 10:38am EDT Jul 16, 2025, 12:02pm EDT The mushroom cloud of the Trinity test in New Mexico. On July 16 ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. THE FIRST NUCLEAR reactor on earth went critical 2 billion years ago in western Africa when groundwater seeped into a rich vein ...

Eighty years ago, in one of the most consequential understatements of all time, Emperor Hirohito told the people of Japan that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” He was originally going to say that “the war ...

Confusion on whether Iran truly needed only “two weeks to four weeks” to make a nuclear weapon, as President Donald Trump suggested on Monday, hangs over the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on the Persian Gulf nation. Nuclear experts call this claim ...