On Wednesday, the Trump campaign was forced to deny a report from “Morning” Joe Scarborough that Donald Trump doesn’t understand why it would be a bad idea to use nuclear weapons. “There’s no truth to this,” campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told The Hill.

Cocaine and nuclear weapons: A good mix? That’s what an official probe into coke abuse by “about a dozen airmen” at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming will investigate, the AP reports.

A special thing happened last weekend at the South Carolina National Security Action Summit: Rick "We Will Never Have the Smart People on Our Side" Santorum met an American citizen who makes him look like a champion of reason.

This week, President Obama mentioned that he is "concerned" with "the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan." What are the chances that that will happen in our lifetime? Let's guess!

The Air Force has roughly 500 officers in charge of protecting and maybe someday launching America's arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles. Nearly all of them cheat on every exam they take, at every chance they get, according to three veterans of the force.

The Air Force announced this afternoon that 37 nuclear missile officers have been implicated in academic cheating scandals and drug rings, and the ongoing investigation may turn up more misdeeds soon.

When Iranian leaders called last week's nuclear deal a "poisoned chalice," they may have meant it literally. The LA Times is reporting that America got the talks started by returning a 7th century BC silver ceremonial chalice believed to have been looted from an Iranian cave. US Customs seized it in 2003, and Iran had been calling for its return ever since.

Some Air Force guys with the launch keys to nuclear warheads accidentally left blast doors open twice this year, but don't worry because the doors are only "intended to help prevent a terrorist...from entering the officers' underground command post and potentially compromising secret launch codes."

In a speech at the Brandenburg Gate, President Obama announced that he would push for the U.S. to reduce its nuclear arsenal by one-third, calling on Russia to do the same. Remember: We can still kill billions of human beings even if we only have 1,000 nuclear warheads instead of 1,500!

Police are looking for a suspect who used a boat to access a Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power plant Sunday morning and exchanged fire with a security guard on the plant grounds before fleeing downriver.

Declaring that North Korea's "nuclear armed forces represent the nation's life which can never be abandoned as long as the imperialists and nuclear threats exist on earth," Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un announced today that the country would be restarting a nuclear reactor it had shut down in 2007, reneging on an agreement it had reached in multilateral talks at the time. The news that the Yongbyon nuclear complex would "restart all nuclear facilities" comes a day after the U.S. sent the destroyer U.S.S. John S. McCain on patrol in the region, and reflected the bellicose tone that Pyongyang has taken since its third successful nuclear test in February. Luckily we're still a ways away from war; all threats between North and South Korea have been conditional ("we will turn your country into a sea of fire... if you provoke us"), and the relaunch of Yongbyon is unlikely to make a huge difference to the country's arsenal. Nonetheless, top U.S. commander in South Korea Gen. James Thurman expressed concern on Good Morning America that an "impulsive decision" by the DPRK leadership could cause "kinetic provocation." [CNN, The Atlantic Wire, NBC]

North Korea, a famine-ridden kingdom ruled by a chubby 20-something cult leader's grandson, is going to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States, its state media announced on Thursday. (It's mad because the UN is prepared to vote for harsher sanctions, aimed at stopping cash transfers into the already impoverished country.) North Korea does not, actually, have the ability to put a nuclear device on a ballistic missile, and if it did it wouldn't use one—it can't afford to alienate its main trading parter, China—but it wouldn't be a Thursday if there wasn't a poetically-worded threat out of Pyongyang:

North Korea dropped a bomb underground yesterday, conducting its third successful nuclear test since 2006 and creating a small seismic event. The explosion was about twice as large as the last test, in 2009, though the bomb is thought to have been made with plutonium, and not the much scarier uranium. U.S. officials had been expecting such a test, and the president has already issued a statement condemning it—as has China, North Korea's only regional ally—though it likely won't stop North Korea from conducting a fourth test in the coming days. North Korean officials remain unbowed, literally: "The DPRK will never bow to any resolutions," a top diplomat told the Conference on Disarmament.

Up until 1968, the United States government had a Top Secret plan for what to do in the event that the president died or went missing under mysterious circumstances. The plan was: Nuke the shit out of everyone right now.

Back in April, North Korea tried to send a rocket into space while the rest of the world was like, "c'mon man, please just don't do that." The launch famously failed after the rocket blew up a few minutes after it was fired off.

The Associated Press has obtained an "EXCLUSIVE" document purporting to prove that Iran is working to build a nuclear weapon with "more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima." Behold! The Chart of Doom!

Okay, I get that there aren't many good choices out there, but still: Newt Gingrich gets the most support in this Fox News poll asking, "Which Republican presidential candidate would you trust MOST with nuclear weapons?" We're finished.

To celebrate its Independence Day, Ukraine yesterday officially opened the first, and most likely only, nuclear missile museum in the world there, the Pervomaisk Strategic Missile Forces Museum. Visitors can check out intercontinental ballistic missiles like "Satan" and "Sandal", as well as have a look around original bunkers. In the ITN video tour above, you also see a Soviet shitter that was used when the present day museum site was an active nuke silo. I'd go.

If there's one thing that Americans learned from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, it's that giving some guy in California $50,000 for a one person space in his nuclear fallout shelter is a good idea. Robert Vicino is CEO and founder of "underground shelter network" Vivos and he's making a lot of money off of stupid concerned people, according to Asahi Shimbun:

A wildfire in New Mexico is now less than one mile from the Los Alamos National Laboratory — where nuclear weapons and other fun things are developed — and a spokesman from the Santa Fe National Forest called it a "very, very big concern, not only locally but nationally and globally." That sounds bad.