During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrate...
At a level of about 18,000 parts per million (ppm), the RFHCO would start to melt. At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the fr...
Andropov’s concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration’s top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without war...
Americans not only smoke more marijuana but also imprison more people for marijuana than any other western industrialized nation.
About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes—the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle—until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cat...
A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7 percent were contaminated with Lis...
You can’t have this kind of war, Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.
When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that...
Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk.
The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than...
The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average.
The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describ...
The cable and the X-unit both had female plugs. Somehow the cable had been installed backward. It would take a couple of days to disassemble the layers of spheres and explosives, remove the cable, and...
Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest...
Nineteen members of an Army detachment were arrested on pot charges at a Nike Hercules base on Mount Gleason, overlooking Los Angeles. One of them had been caught drying a large amount of marijuana on...
Green had been amazed by their discovery: you could break into a Titan II complex with just a credit card. Once the officers showed him how to do it, Green requested permission to stage a black hat op...
Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one, Einstein said. In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.
Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of thos...
During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on th...
And workers who needed to go to the bathroom weren't allowed to take a break. They were forced to pee right on the slaughterhouse floor, near meat that people would soon be eating.