For fifteen years, from the apex of the Cuban Missile Crisis until 1977, the launch code for America’s Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles wasn’t a complex, unbreakable string of digits.

Erin D. Dumbacher is the Stanton nuclear security senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States has the power and a process to respond when it is under nuclear attack, but only ...

Over the past few months, members from both chambers of Congress have expressed doubt over whether President Donald Trump should retain the presidential authority to unilaterally launch a pre-emptive ...

The sponge metaphor first emerged in 1978 when the Air Force’s top general announced a new plan to base cutting-edge nuclear missiles in the Southwest. The “Missile, Experimental,” or MX, a powerful ...