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.

F.E. Warren Air Force Base Wyoming - 1st Lieutenant Matthew Bejcek (front) and Captain Mark Olenick keep watch over Launch Control Center 24 hours 3 days at a time and cycle out with other members of ...

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 ...

Brett McGurk is a CNN global affairs analyst who served in senior national security positions under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In the summer of 2022, I ...

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 ...