Articles by Jeffrey W. Mason
We found 19 results.
October: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Oct 2016
October 30, 1961 – The Soviet Union’s “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful nuclear weapon ever constructed was detonated after being dropped from a TU-95 bomber at approximately four kilometers altitude over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Russian Arctic Sea. This hydrogen bomb formally designated RDS-220, which weighed about 27 tons and was eight meters long, had an estimated yield of 50 megatons or the equivalent of 3,800 Hiroshima bombs. The tremendous blast triggered a seismic shock wave, equivalent to an earthquake registered at 5.0 on the Richter Scale, that travelled around the world.
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Jeffrey W. Mason | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Sep 2016
September 25, 1959 – A U.S. Navy antisubmarine aircraft carrying an unarmed nuclear depth charge developed mechanical problems but was unable to reach land to make an emergency landing and crashed into the Puget Sound, Washington. The nuclear weapon was never recovered despite an extensive search. There remain deadly serious concerns about the very long-term radioactive contamination from this incident and hundreds of other similar Broken Arrows.
→ read full articleAugust: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Aug 2016
August 8, 1994 – – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile materials in the last 25 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, security officials at Munich International Airport in Germany arrested individuals who were caught in possession of 363.4 grams of plutonium – enough to make one or more radiological weapons or dirty bombs.
→ read full articleJuly: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Jul 2016
July 1, 1991 – On this date, the Warsaw Pact (established in 1955 as a response to the 1949 establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), also known in the Soviet bloc as The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance signed by Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, formally dissolved as a communist military alliance. Yet NATO, 1949-present, not only continues to exist but has grown and expanded in order to further “contain Russia and protect former Soviet republics and Eastern European nations from Russian military aggression.”
→ read full articleThis Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Jun 2016
June 23, 1942 – The first nuclear weapons-related accident occurred on this date in the city of Leipzig, Germany involving Nazi atomic scientists Werner Heisenberg and Robert Doepel. While demonstrating Germany’s first neutron propagation experiment, workers checked the atomic pile for a heavy water leak. During the inspection, air leaked in igniting the uranium powder inside.
→ read full articleMay: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation - TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 May 2016
May 1, 1962 – A nuclear test code-named Beryl was conducted in French-occupied Algeria. However, due to improper sealing of the underground shaft, a spectacular mushroom cloud burst through the concrete cap venting highly radioactive dust and gas into the atmosphere. The plume climbed to 8,500 feet high and radiation was detected hundreds of miles away. This was just one of 210 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the French government in north Africa and the Pacific region in the period from 1960-96.
→ read full articleApril: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
11 Apr 2016
April 10, 1963 – In the past, eight nuclear submarines, six of them Soviet/Russian and the other two American, have sunk with dozens of nuclear ballistic missiles also lost at sea. Some of the nuclear reactors and warheads in these and other military vessels or aircraft lost at sea are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting flora, fauna, and the health and well-being of millions of people.
→ read full articleMarch: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
7 Mar 2016
March 11, 2011 – After a large magnitude earthquake and a powerful tsunami struck northeast Japan, three of the six nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-chi facility suffered partial meltdowns resulting in the evacuation of tens of thousands of nearby residents. Five years later, the disaster which has claimed more than 15,000 lives so far is an ongoing catastrophe.
→ read full articleFebruary: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Feb 2016
February 1, 1958 – As part of the U.S. strategy of massive (nuclear) retaliation, the UK agreed to station 60 nuclear-armed Thor intermediate-range ballistic missiles at four U.K. military bases. Royal Air Force personnel staffed the bases, but all the nuclear weapons that were provided remained in full U.S. ownership, custody, and control. These same missiles were put on high-alert status during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
11 Jan 2016
January 9, 1987 – Dean Rusk (1909-1994), a former Secretary of State (1961-69) under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who received many awards during his career including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, spoke out against nuclear weapons with a statement that, “Nuclear war not only eliminates all the answers, but eliminates all the questions.”
→ read full articleOctober: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
5 Oct 2015
October 4, 1957 – The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, as the Space Age began. U.S. government leaders concerned that a missile capable of launching satellites might soon be able to place a nuclear warhead on U.S. or allied territory led to fears of a “missile gap.”
→ read full articleSeptember: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
7 Sep 2015
September 4, 1978 – War Resisters League (WRL) members and their supporters demonstrated against nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear power plants simultaneously in Red Square near the Kremlin in Moscow and on the White House front lawn in Washington, DC.
→ read full articleAugust: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
10 Aug 2015
August 6, 1945 – Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets piloted the 509th Composite Group’s B-29 Superfortress bomber named Enola Gay, in honor of the pilot’s mother, from Tinian in the Marianas chain of Pacific Ocean islands to Hiroshima, Japan where the enriched uranium-fueled fission bomb code named “Little Boy” was dropped over a city of a quarter million inhabitants at 8:15:17 a.m. local time.
→ read full articleJuly: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
6 Jul 2015
July 1, 1968 – The U.S., U.K., the Soviet Union, and 58 other nations signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The Preamble of the agreement, which today includes 191 state parties, referred explicitly to the need for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has not yet been realized due mostly to the U.S. Senate’s unwillingness to ratify it.
→ read full articleJune: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation - TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Jun 2015
June 3, 1980 – President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was awakened by his military assistant, General William Odom, around 2:30 a.m. and informed that NORAD’s computers had detected a launch of 2,200 Soviet ICBMs heading for U.S. targets. The incident was one of many so-called “false warnings.”
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Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
11 May 2015
May 1, 1982 – The Washington Post featured an article by Bill Prochnau titled, “With the Bomb, There Is No Answer,” in which he reported that marijuana was discovered in one of the underground missile control launch centers of a Minuteman ICBM squadron at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.
→ read full articleMarch: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
9 Mar 2015
March 1, 1982 – President Ronald Reagan watched the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center rehearse a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union…
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Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
9 Feb 2015
February 17, 1953 – Years after serving as the civilian director of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave one of many speeches opposing the growing nuclear arms race, this one at the Council on Foreign Relations.
→ read full articleJanuary: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
Jeffrey W. Mason – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
12 Jan 2015
January 2015 – Nuclear Threat in History
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