The Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs turns 30 on July 7. Leo Szilard, the physicist who since 1945 had been proposing just such a meeting of Russian and Western scientists to discuss ...

Leo Szilard, pictured circa 1945, circulated a petition to other Manhattan Project scientists, asking President Truman to reconsider using the atomic bomb on Japan.

Also on hand is Physics World’s Matin Durrani, who chats about the remarkable life of the Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard – who encouraged the US to develop nuclear weapons during the Second ...

Edwin Lyman is the director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy program. He is a co-author (with David Lochbaum and Susan Q. Stranahan) of the book ...

The day before Leo Szilard devised the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, the great physicist Ernest Rutherford proclaimed that anyone who propounded atomic power was “talking moonshine.” ...

A mushroom cloud towers over Nagasaki after the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1945. Albert Einstein struggled with his role in the creation of the bomb and the devastation wrought by the U.S ...