Scientific American – November 2023: The issue features The New Nuclear Age – Inside America’s plan to remake its atomic arsenal; The Most Shocking Discovery in Astrophysics Is 25 Years Old – Scientists are still trying to figure out dark energy; Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs – The U.S. is ramping up construction of new “plutonium pits” for nuclear weapons….

The Most Shocking Discovery in Astrophysics Is 25 Years Old

A quarter of a century after detecting dark energy, scientists are still trying to figure out what it is

BY RICHARD PANEK

One afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking. Nicholas Suntzeff, an associate astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and Brian Schmidt, who had recently completed his doctoral thesis at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, were specialists in supernovae—exploding stars. Suntzeff and Schmidt decided that the time had finally come to use their expertise to tackle one of the fundamental questions in cosmology: What is the fate of the universe?

Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You’ve Never Heard Of

A road trip through the communities shouldering the U.S.’s nuclear missile revival

BY ABE STREEP

The point of the thing was to forever change our concept of power. When the U.S. military assembled a team of scientists, led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, to build a nuclear bomb during World War II with the hope of beating the Nazis to such a terrible creation, many of those involved saw their efforts as a strange kind of civic destiny. The Manhattan Project, wrote Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was “compelled from the beginning not by malice or hatred but by hope for a better world.” Oppenheimer himself once said, “The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”