MAD

It's crucial to monitor and model nuclear weapons testing, which is in part the purpose of this equipment at the Rocky Flats Plant's Critical Mass Laboratory (photographed in 1970). The US and Russia (and before that the USSR) have been sparing over the limits of testing for decades.

MAD/Mutually Assured Destruction, the policy the US and USSR implements to prevent nuclear war, has worked for almost 70 years, something rather amazing given just how easy it is to have an accident or a misread as to what each country will do in a crisis when it comes to tech as fragile and powerful as nukes truly are. With this in mind, it's no wonder posturing, quasi lying and deception become part of the game where there is no winner if missiles are launched to bring about Armageddon, military style.

IN A MAZE of tunnels 900 feet beneath the Nevada desert, US nuclear weapons scientists have since the 1990s been intermittently agitating flecks of plutonium with chemical high explosives, carefully trying to push them to the brink of a chain reaction capable of yielding nuclear force.

IN A SEPARATE network of underground tunnels about 4,800 miles away, in the northern Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Circle, Russia conducts its own such experiments, meant to model the key chemical and physical actions that occur in the run-up to a full-blown nuclear explosion, without actually causing one.

Experiments at the two sites are used by both nations to help ensure their nuclear arsenals remain viable but conducted under a blanket of secrecy. And so they’ve given rise to suspicions—and accusations—that they violate a 1996 global treaty designed to stymie nuclear weapons innovations by barring any nuclear explosions.

MAD indeed.