The US Air Force developed a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon as a display of military might at the height of the Cold War.

In an exclusive interview with The Observer, Dr Leonard Reiffel, 73, the physicist who fronted the project in the late Fifties at the US military-backed Armour Research Foundation, revealed America's extraordinary lunar plan.

'It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on earth,' he said yesterday. 'The US was lagging behind in the space race.'

We opened homepage titled "Friend" with an aim to achieve a common progress of humankind and contribute to promoting mutual understanding and cooperation under the ideals of independence, peace and friendship.

A fascinating mix of friendly greetings, celebratory "news" and harsh propaganda from North Korea.

I had a discussion recently with friends about the various depictions of space combat in science fiction movies, TV shows, and books. We have the fighter-plane engagements of Star Wars, the subdued, two-dimensional naval combat in Star Trek, the Newtonian planes of Battlestar Galactica, the staggeringly furious energy exchanges of the combat wasps in Peter Hamilton's books, and the use of antimatter rocket engines themselves as weapons in other sci-fi. But suppose we get out there, go terraform Mars, and the Martian colonists actually revolt. Or suppose we encounter hostile aliens. How would space combat actually go?

USA spenderar årligen 600 miljarder amerikanska dollar på sina militära styrkor. Det utgör hälften av världens samlade militära utgifter. USA innehar idag 2700 av världens 8000 kärnvapenstridsspetsar. I dagsläget bedriver USA två krig där tusentals civila dödas varje år. Senast i förra veckan kom nya rapporter på hur civila dödats av flygstridskrafter och andra offensiva delar av det amerikanska kriget mot terrorismen i Afghanistan, operation Enduring Freedom.

Obama må vara en bättre president än George W Bush. Men det kvalificerar knappast någon till att per automatik få världens finaste fredsutmärkelse. Utmärkelsen säger en hel del om hur mycket krig Nobelkommittén tycker är okej för att fortfarande ses som en fredshjälte.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The internet agency Kavkaz Centre provides reporting of events in the Islamic world, the Caucasus, and Russia. One of Kavkaz Centre's chief objectives is to report events in the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria connected to the Russian military aggression against the CRI. Besides we also provide international news agencies with news-letters, background information and assistance in making independent journalistic work in Caucasus.

The risks are illustrated by the following selection of mishap. If the people involved had exercised less caution, or if some unfortunate coincidental event had occurred, escalation to nuclear war can easily be imagined.

Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States are at odds over 1.2 million square kilometers (460,000 square miles) of Arctic seabed which could possibly hold 25% of the world's oil and gas.