Do you remember the sword-fight scene in The Princess Bride? And how Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts kept up a discussion about their various strategems? Turns out those are real, historic fencing references.

A mystery explosion at a Russian weapons testing range involved radioactive materials, authorities admitted on Saturday, as the blast's death toll rose and signs of a creeping radiation emergency, or at the least fear of one, grew harder to mask.

International military exercises “Summer Shield 2019” officially began this week in Latvia. The exercises will take place from May 13 to 25, reported mil.lv.

The global competition to develop fully autonomous weapons systems guided by artificial intelligence risks developing into a full-blown arms race, according to a new report from a Dutch peace group. Lethal autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” as they are described by Pax, the anti-war NGO behind the report, are designed to select and engage targets without proximate human control.

A new initiative by the US Army suggests “another significant step towards lethal autonomous weapons,” warns a leading artificial-intelligence researcher who has called for a ban on so-called “killer robots.” The Army Contracting Command has called on potential vendors in industry and academia to submit ideas to help build its Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS), which a Defense Department solicitation says will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to give ground-combat vehicles autonomous targeting capabilities.

China’s landing of a rover on the far side of the moon grabbed headlines around the world this week. Less noticed, the country’s state media reported on progress in another arena: game-changing naval weaponry. The state-run Global Times said on Thursday (Jan. 3) that Chinese warships will soon be equipped with electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles with “incredibly destructive velocity,” and that the underlying technology was based on ”fully independent intellectual property,” rather than designs copied from other nations. It cited a report that appeared Wednesday on China’s CCTV.

A Chinese navy warship armed with what looks like a mounted electromagnetic railgun has apparently set sail, possibly for testing in the open ocean.

As the fortune of war shifted against Nazi Germany by the mid of 1942, its leadership increasingly placed their hopes in the development of Wunderwaffe (Miracle Weapons) to turn the tide back in their favor. Many of such weapon designs never went further than the concept stage and that which went into combat service, suffered from frequent reliability issues as their production was rushed. While never made in significant numbers to make an impact, their pioneering designs and technology would leave a lasting impact on not just future weaponry and in other fields as well.

China has developed a new portable laser weapon that can zap a target from nearly a kilometre away, according to researchers involved in the project. The ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle is classified as being “non-lethal” but produces an energy beam that cannot be seen by the naked eye but can pass through windows and cause the “instant carbonisation” of human skin and tissues.

The US has dramatically stepped up the effort to overhaul the existing arsenal and prepare for the day when it might once again be enlarged.

New evidence continues to accumulate showing how Official Washington got key elements of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals wrong, especially how these two crimes of state originated in treacherous actions to secure the powers of the presidency, writes Robert Parry. (Mar. 9, 2013)

The Trump administration is signing off on selling more than $1 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visits the United States. The State Department says the administration told Congress on Thursday that it plans to approve the sale. Lawmakers will have 30 days to act if they want to try to stop it.

Nearly half of US arms exports over the past five years have gone to the war-stricken Middle East, with Saudi Arabia consolidating its place as the world’s second biggest importer, a report has shown. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) said on Monday that global transfer of major weapons systems between 2013 and 2017 rose by 10% compared with the five-year period before that, in a continuation of an upward trend that began two decades ago.

Four United States senators are urging a new approach to U.S.-Russian relations based on renewed arms control efforts, but you probably haven't heard about it from the mainstream media, Gilbert Doctorow and Ray McGovern report.

Russia has said it successfully launched a hypersonic missile described by Vladimir Putin as an ideal weapon when he unveiled new armaments earlier this month. The Kinzhal missile was launched from a MiG-31 aircraft that took off from an airfield in south-western Russia, the defence ministry said. “The launch went according to plan: the hypersonic missile hit its target,” the ministry said.

Weeks before he killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Nikolas Cruz bought an AK-47-style rifle at a gun shop. While he didn’t use it during his killing spree on Feb. 14, his purchase drew attention to civilian versions of one of the most famous Russian inventions of the 20th century, the AK-47. In late February, shortly after the shooting, a small group of protesters gathered at a large, nondescript warehouse in Pompano Beach, about 13 miles from Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Seventy-five years ago, in Operation Gunnerside, a stealthy group of commandos took out a crucial Nazi chemical plant

A 61-year-old Swiss man suspected of selling arms illegally to Austria has been arrested by police in St Gallen. During a search of a property in Degersheim last week police seized 280 weapons, over 100,000 rounds of ammunition and 1.3 million francs in cash, St Gallen police said in a press release.

Here are seven reasons why the United States should not seek to deploy nuclear weapons in the Korean Peninsula. By By Jon Wolfsthal, Toby Dalton.

The first step is acknowledging that in a standoff, it could lose, and badly. By Harry J. Kazianis.