The
history of nuclear weapons chronicles the
development of
nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are devices that possess enormous destructive
potential derived from
nuclear
fission or
nuclear fusion
reactions. Starting with the scientific breakthroughs of the
1930s which made their development possible,
and continuing through the
nuclear
arms race and
nuclear testing of
the
Cold War, the issues of
proliferation and possible use for
terrorism still remain in the early
21st
century.
The first
fission weapons, also known as "atomic bombs," were developed
jointly by the United
States
, Britain
and Canada
during
World War II in what was called the
Manhattan Project. In
August 1945 two were
dropped on Japan
ending the
Pacific War. An international
team was dispatched to help work on the project.
The Soviet Union
started development shortly thereafter with their
own atomic bomb project,
and not long after that both countries developed even more powerful
fusion weapons called "hydrogen bombs."
During the
Cold War, the Soviet Union and
United States each acquired nuclear weapons arsenals numbering in
the thousands, placing many of them onto
rockets which could hit targets anywhere in the
world. Currently there are at least nine
countries with functional
nuclear weapons. A considerable amount of international
negotiating has focused on the threat of
nuclear warfare and the
proliferation of nuclear weapons to
new nations or groups.
There have been (at least) four major false alarms, the most recent
in 1995, that resulted in the activation of either the US's or
Russia's nuclear attack early warning protocols.
Physics and politics in the 1930s
- See the main articles at History of physics, Nazi Germany, and World
War II.
In the first decades of the twentieth century,
physics was revolutionized with developments in the
understanding of the nature of
atoms. In
1898, French physicist
Pierre Curie and his Polish wife
Maria Sklodowska-Curie had discovered
that present in
pitchblende, an ore of
uranium, was a substance which emitted large
amounts of
radioactivity, which they
named
radium. This raised the hopes of both
scientists and lay people that the elements around us could contain
tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped.
Experiments by
Ernest Rutherford
in
1911 indicated that the vast majority of an
atom's
mass was contained in a very
small
nucleus at its core, made up of
protons, surrounded by a web of whirring
electrons. In
1932,
James Chadwick discovered that the
nucleus contained another fundamental particle, the
neutron, and in the same year
John Cockcroft and
Ernest Walton "split the atom" for the first
time, the first occasion on which an atomic nucleus of one element
had been successfully changed to a different nucleus by artificial
means.
In
1934 the idea of chain reaction via neutron
was proposed by
Leó Szilárd,
who patented the idea of the atomic bomb. The patent was
transferred in secret to Britain's Royal Navy in
1936. In a very real sense, Szilárd was the father of
the atomic bomb academically.
In
1934, French physicists
Irène and
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
discovered that artificial
radioactivity could be induced in stable
elements by bombarding them with
alpha
particles, and in the same year Italian physicist
Enrico Fermi reported similar results when
bombarding uranium with neutrons.
In December 1938, the German chemists
Otto
Hahn and
Fritz Strassmann sent
a manuscript to
Naturwissenschaften reporting
they had detected the element
barium after
bombarding
uranium with
neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these
results to
Lise Meitner. Meitner, and
her nephew
Otto Robert Frisch,
correctly interpreted these results as being
nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this
experimentally on 13 January 1939.
Even
before it was published, Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation of
the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with
Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at
Princeton
University
. Isidor Isaac
Rabi and
Willis Lamb, two
Columbia University physicists working
at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi
said he told Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. Bohr soon thereafter
went from Princeton to Columbia to see Fermi. Not finding Fermi in
his office, Bohr went down to the cyclotron area and found Herbert
Anderson. Bohr grabbed him by the shoulder and said: “Young man,
let me explain to you about something new and exciting in
physics.”
It was clear to a number of scientists at Columbia that they should
try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium
from neutron bombardment.
On 25 January 1939, an experimental team at
Columbia University conducted the first nuclear fission experiment
in the United States, which was done in the basement of Pupin Hall
; the members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson,
Eugene T. Booth,
John
R. Dunning,
Enrico Fermi,
G.
Norris Glasoe, and
Francis G. Slack.
As the
Nazi army marched into first Czechoslovakia
in 1938, and then Poland
in 1939,
beginning World War II, many of
Europe's top physicists had already begun to flee from the imminent
conflict. Scientists on both sides of the conflict were well
aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon,
but at the time no one was quite sure how it could be done. In the
early years of the Second World War, physicists abruptly stopped
publishing on the topic of fission, an act of self-censorship to
keep the opposing side from gaining any advantages.
From Los Alamos to Hiroshima
By the beginning of
World War II, there
was concern among scientists in the
Allied nations that
Nazi Germany might have
its own project to develop
fission-based weapons. Organized research first began in
Britain as part of the "
Tube Alloys"
project, and in the United States a small amount of funding was
given for research into uranium weapons starting in 1939 with the
Uranium Committee under
Lyman James Briggs.
At the urging of British scientists, though, who had made crucial
calculations indicating that a fission weapon could be completed
within only a few years, by 1941 the project had been wrested into
better bureaucratic hands, and in
1942 came
under the auspices of a Military Policy Committee led by General
Leslie Groves as the
Manhattan Project.
Scientifically led by the American physicist
Robert Oppenheimer, the project brought
together the top scientific minds of the day (many exiles from
Europe) with the production power of American industry for the goal
of producing fission-based explosive devices before Germany could.
Britain
and the U.S. agreed to pool their resources and information for the
project, but the other Allied power—the Soviet Union under Joseph
Stalin—was not informed.
A massive industrial and scientific undertaking, the
Manhattan Project involved many of the
world's great physicists in the scientific and development aspects.
The United States made an unprecedented investment into wartime
research for the project, which was spread across more than 30
sites in the U.S. and Canada.
Scientific knowledge was centralized at a
secret laboratory known as Los
Alamos
, previously a small ranch school near Santa
Fe
, New
Mexico
.
Uranium appears in nature primarily in two isotopes:
uranium-238 and
uranium-235. When the nucleus of uranium-235
absorbs a neutron, it undergoes nuclear fission, splitting into two
"fission products" and releasing energy and 2.5 neutrons on
average. Uranium-238, on the other hand, absorbs neutrons but does
not split, effectively putting a stop to any ongoing fission
reaction.
It was discovered that an atomic bomb based on uranium would need
to be made of almost completely pure uranium-235 (at least 80%
pure), or else the presence of uranium-238 would quickly curtail
the
nuclear chain reaction.
The team of scientists working on the Manhattan Project immediately
realized that one of the largest problems they would have to solve
was how to remove uranium-235 from natural uranium, which was
composed of 99.3% uranium-238.
Two methods were developed during the wartime project, both of
which took advantage of the fact that uranium-238 has a slightly
greater atomic mass than uranium-235:
electromagnetic
separation and
gaseous
diffusion—methods which separated
isotopes based on their differing weights.
Another
secret site was erected at rural Oak Ridge, Tennessee
, for the large-scale production and purification of
the rare isotope.
It was a
massive investment: at the time, one of the Oak Ridge facilities
(K-25
) was the largest factory under one roof. The
Oak Ridge site employed tens of thousands of employees at its peak,
most of whom had no idea what they were working on.
Though uranium-238 cannot be used for the initial stage of an
atomic bomb, when U-238 absorbs a neutron, it transforms first into
an unstable element, uranium-239, and then decays into
neptunium-239, and finally the relatively stable
plutonium-239, an element which does not
exist in nature.
Plutonium is also fissile and can be used to create a fission
reaction, and after Enrico Fermi
achieved the world's first sustained and controlled nuclear chain
reaction in the creation of the first "atomic pile"—a primitive
nuclear reactor—in a basement at the
University
of Chicago
, massive reactors were secretly created at what is
now known as Hanford
Site
in the state of Washington
, using the Columbia
River as cooling water, to transform uranium-238 into plutonium
for a bomb.
For a fission weapon to operate, there must be a
critical mass—the amount needed for
a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction—of fissile material
bombarded with neutrons at any one time. The simplest form of
nuclear weapon is a
gun-type
fission weapon, where a sub-critical mass of fissile material
(such as uranium-235) would be shot at another sub-critical mass of
fissile material. The result would be a super-critical mass which,
when bombarded with neutrons, would undergo fission at a rapid rate
and create the desired explosion.
The weapons envisaged in 1942 were the
two gun-type weapons, Little
Boy
(uranium) and Thin Man (plutonium), and the Fat Man
plutonium implosion bomb.
In early 1943 Oppenheimer determined that two projects should
proceed forwards: the "Thin Man" project (plutonium gun) and the
"Fat Man" project (plutonium implosion). The plutonium gun was to
receive the bulk of the research effort, as it was the project with
the most uncertainty involved. It was assumed that the uranium
gun-type bomb could then be adapted from it.
The two fission bomb assembly
methods.
But in April 1944 it was found by
Emilio Segrè that plutonium produced by
the
Hanford reactors had too high a level of
background neutron radiation, and underwent
spontaneous fission to a very small
extent, due to the presence of impurities of the Pu-240 isotope. If
such plutonium were used in a "gun assembly," the chain reaction
would start in the split seconds before the critical mass was
assembled, blowing the weapon apart before it would have any great
effect (this is known as a
fizzle).
So
development of Fat
Man, the implosion bomb, was given high
priority. Chemical explosives were used to
implode a sub-critical sphere
of plutonium, thus increasing its density and making it into a
critical mass. The difficulties with implosion were in the problem
of making the chemical explosives deliver a perfectly uniform shock
wave upon the plutonium sphere— if it were even slightly
asymmetric, the weapon would fizzle (which would be expensive,
messy, and not a very effective military device). This problem was
circumvented by the use of hydrodynamic "lenses"—explosive
materials of differing densities—which would focus the blast waves
inside the imploding sphere, akin to the way in which an optical
lens focuses light rays.
After
D-Day, General Groves had ordered a team
of scientists—Project
Alsos—to follow
eastward-moving victorious Allied troops into Europe in order to
assess the status of the German nuclear program (and to prevent the
westward-moving Russians from gaining any materials or scientific
manpower). It was concluded that while Nazi Germany had also had an
atomic bomb program, headed by
Werner
Heisenberg, the government had not made a significant
investment in the project, and had been nowhere near success.
Historians claim to have found a rough schematic showing a Nazi
nuclear bomb. Research was conducted in the
German nuclear energy project.
In March
1945, a Nazi scientific team was directed by the physicist Kurt Diebner to develop a primitive nuclear
device in Ohrdruf
, Thuringia
.
By the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, the
Manhattan Project was still months away from a working weapon. That
April, after the death of American President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Vice-President
Harry S. Truman was told about the secret wartime
project for the first time.
Because of the difficulties in making a working plutonium
bomb, it was decided that there should be a test of the
weapon, and Truman wanted to know for sure if it would work before
his meeting with Joseph Stalin at an upcoming conference on the
future of postwar Europe.
On July 16, 1945, in
the desert north of Alamogordo
, New
Mexico, the first nuclear test
took place, code-named "Trinity
," using a device nicknamed "the Gadget." The test, a plutonium
implosion type device, released the equivalent of 19
kilotons of TNT, far mightier than any weapon ever
used before.
The news of the test's success was rushed to
Truman, who used it as leverage at the upcoming Potsdam Conference, held near Berlin
.
After hearing arguments from scientists and military officers over
the possible uses of the weapons against Japan (though some
recommended using them as "demonstrations" in unpopulated areas,
most recommended using them against "built up" targets, (a
euphemistic term for populated cities), Truman
ordered the use of the weapons on Japanese cities, hoping it would
send a strong message which would end in the capitulation of the
Japanese leadership and avoid a lengthy invasion of the
island.
There
were suggestions to drop the atomic bomb on Tokyo
, the capital
of Japan, but concerns about Tokyo's cultural heritage changed the
plan. On May 10–11, 1945 The Target Committee at Los Alamos,
led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima,
Yokohama, and the arsenal at Kokura as possible targets.
On August
6, 1945, a uranium-based weapon, "Little Boy", was let loose on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a plutonium-based
weapon, "Fat
Man", was dropped onto the city of Nagasaki. The atomic bombs
killed at least one hundred thousand Japanese outright, most of
them civilians, with the heat, radiation, and blast effects.
Many tens of thousands would die later of radiation sickness and
related cancers. Truman promised a "rain of ruin" if Japan did not
surrender immediately, threatening to eliminate Japanese cities,
one by one; Japan surrendered on
August
15. Truman's threat was in fact a
bluff, since the US had but one remaining
uranium-gun type bomb completed.
See also: Japanese
nuclear weapons program
Soviet atomic bomb project
- See the main article at Soviet atomic bomb
project.
The
Soviet
Union was not invited to share in the new weapons
developed by the United States and the other Allies. During the war, information had been
pouring in from a number of volunteer spies involved with the
Manhattan Project (known in Soviet cables under the code-name of
Enormoz), and the Soviet nuclear physicist
Igor Kurchatov was carefully watching the
Allied weapons development. It came as no surprise to Stalin when
Truman had informed him at the Potsdam conference that he had a
"powerful new weapon." Truman was shocked at Stalin's lack of
interest.
The Soviet spies in the U.S. project were all volunteers and none
were Russians. One of the most valuable,
Klaus Fuchs, was a German émigré theoretical
physicist who had been a part in the early British nuclear efforts
and had been part of the UK mission to Los Alamos during the war.
Fuchs had been intimately involved in the development of the
implosion weapon, and passed on detailed cross-sections of the
"Trinity" device to his Soviet contacts. Other Los Alamos
spies—none of whom knew each other—included
Theodore Hall and
David Greenglass. The information was kept
but not acted upon, as Russia was still too busy fighting the war
in Europe to devote resources to this new project.
In the years immediately after World War II, the issue of who
should control atomic weapons became a major international point of
contention. Many of the Los Alamos scientists who had built the
bomb began to call for "international control of atomic energy,"
often calling for either control by transnational organizations or
the purposeful distribution of weapons information to all
superpowers, but due to a deep distrust of the intentions of the
Soviet Union, both in postwar Europe and in general, the
policy-makers of the United States worked to attempt to secure an
American nuclear monopoly.
A half-hearted plan for international control was proposed at the
newly formed
United Nations by
Bernard Baruch ("The
Baruch Plan"), but it was clear both to American
commentators—and to the Soviets—that it was an attempt primarily to
stymie Russian nuclear efforts. The Soviets vetoed the plan,
effectively ending any immediate postwar negotiations on atomic
energy, and made overtures towards banning the use of atomic
weapons in general.
All the while, the Soviets had put their full industrial and
manpower might into the development of their own atomic weapons.
The initial problem for the Soviets was primarily one of
resources—they had not scouted out uranium resources in the Soviet
Union and the U.S. had made deals to monopolise the largest known
(and high purity) reserves in the
Belgian
Congo.
The USSR used penal
labour to mine the old deposits in Czechoslovakia—now an area under their control—and searched for
other domestic deposits (which were eventually found).
Two days after the bombing of
Nagasaki, the U.S. government released an
official technical history of the Manhattan Project, authored by
Princeton physicist
Henry DeWolf
Smyth, known colloquially as the
Smyth
Report. The sanitized summary of the wartime effort focused
primarily on the production facilities and scale of investment,
written in part to justify the wartime expenditure to the American
public.
The Soviet program, under the suspicious watch of former
NKVD chief
Lavrenty Beria
(a participant and victor in Stalin's
Great
Purge of the 1930s), would use the Report as a blueprint,
seeking to duplicate as much as possible the American effort. The
"secret cities" used for the Soviet equivalents of Hanford and Oak
Ridge literally vanished from the maps for decades to come.
At the
Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, Arzamas-16
, physicist Yuli
Khariton led the scientific effort to develop the
weapon. Beria distrusted his scientists, however, and he
distrusted the carefully collected espionage information. As such,
Beria assigned multiple teams of scientists to the same task
without informing each team of the other's existence. If they
arrived at different conclusions, Beria would bring them together
for the first time and have them debate with their newfound
counterparts.
Beria used the espionage information as a
way to double-check the progress of his scientists, and in his
effort for duplication of the American project even rejected more
efficient bomb designs in favor of ones which more closely mimicked
the tried-and-true "Fat
Man" bomb used by the U.S. against
Nagasaki.
Working under a stubborn and scientifically ignorant administrator,
the Soviet scientists struggled on.
On August 29, 1949, the effort brought
its results, when the USSR tested its first fission bomb, dubbed
"Joe-1
" by the
U.S., years ahead of American predictions. The news of the first
Soviet bomb was announced to the world first by the United States,
which had detected the nuclear
fallout it generated from its test site in Kazakhstan
.
The loss of the American monopoly on nuclear weapons marked the
first tit-for-tat of the
nuclear arms
race. The response in the U.S. was one of apprehension, fear,
and scapegoating, which would lead eventually into the Red-baiting
tactics of
McCarthyism. Yet recent
information from unclassified Venona intercepts and the opening of
the KGB archives after the fall of the Soviet Union show that the
USSR had useful spies that helped their program, although none were
identified by the McCarthy. Before this, though, President Truman
would announce his decision to begin a crash program to develop a
far more powerful weapon than those which were used against Japan:
the
hydrogen bomb.
The first thermonuclear weapons
The notion of using a fission weapon to ignite a process of
nuclear fusion can be dated back to
1942. At the first major theoretical conference on the development
of an atomic bomb hosted by
J.
Robert Oppenheimer at the University
of California, Berkeley
, participant Edward
Teller directed the majority of the discussion towards Enrico Fermi's idea of a "Super" bomb which
would utilize the same reactions which powered the Sun itself.
It was thought at the time that a fission weapon would be quite
simple to develop and that perhaps work on a hydrogen bomb would be
possible to complete before the end of the Second World War.
However, in reality the problem of a "regular" atomic bomb was
large enough to preoccupy the scientists for the next few years,
much less the more speculative "Super." Only Teller continued
working on the project—against the will of project leaders
Oppenheimer and
Hans Bethe.
After the
atomic bombings of Japan, many scientists at Los
Alamos rebelled against the notion of creating a weapon
thousands of times more powerful than the first atomic
bombs. For the scientists the question was in part
technical—the weapon design was still quite uncertain and
unworkable—and in part moral: such a weapon, they argued, could
only be used against large civilian populations, and could thus
only be used as a weapon of genocide.
Many scientists, such as Bethe, urged that the United States should
not develop such weapons and set an example towards the Soviet
Union. Promoters of the weapon, including Teller,
Ernest Lawrence, and
Luis Alvarez, argued that such a development
was inevitable, and to deny such protection to the people of the
United States—especially when the Soviet Union was likely to create
such a weapon themselves—was itself an immoral and unwise
act.
Oppenheimer, who was now head of the General Advisory Committee of
the successor to the Manhattan Project, the
Atomic Energy
Commission, presided over a recommendation against the
development of the weapon. The reasons were in part because the
success of the technology seemed limited at the time (and not worth
the investment of resources to confirm whether this was so), and
because Oppenheimer believed that the atomic forces of the United
States would be more effective if they consisted of many large
fission weapons (of which multiple bombs could be dropped on the
same targets) rather than the large and unwieldy predictions of
massive super bombs, for which there were a relatively limited
amounts of targets of the size to warrant such a development.
Furthermore, were such weapons developed by both the U.S. and the
USSR, they would be more effectively used against the U.S. than by
it, as the U.S. had far more regions of dense industrial and
civilian activity which would serve as ideal targets for the large
weapons than the Soviet Union did.
In the end, President Truman made the final decision, looking for a
proper response to the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. On
January 31, 1950, Truman announced a crash program to develop the
hydrogen (fusion) bomb. At this point, however, the exact mechanism
was still not known: the "classical" hydrogen bomb, whereby the
heat of the fission bomb would be used to ignite the
fusion material, seemed highly unworkable. However, an insight by
Los Alamos mathematician
Stanislaw
Ulam showed that the fission bomb and the fusion fuel could be
in separate parts of the bomb, and that
radiation of the
fission bomb could first work in a way to
compress the
fusion material before igniting it.
Teller pushed the notion further, and used the results of the
boosted-fission "George" test (a boosted-fission device using a
small amount of fusion fuel to boost the yield of a fission bomb)
to confirm the fusion of heavy hydrogen elements before preparing
for their first true multi-stage,
Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb test. Many
scientists initially against the weapon, such as Oppenheimer and
Bethe, changed their previous opinions, seeing the development as
being unstoppable.
The first
fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November 1, 1952, on
Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall
Islands
, code-named "Mike
".
"Mike" used liquid
deuterium as its fusion
fuel and a large fission weapon as its trigger. The device was a
prototype design and not a deliverable weapon: standing over 20 ft
(6 m) high and weighing at least 140,000 lb (64 t) (its
refrigeration equipment added an additional 24,000 lb as well), it
could not have been dropped from even the largest planes.
Its
explosion yielded 10.4 megatons of
energy—over 450 times the power of the bomb dropped onto Nagasaki— and obliterated Elugelab
, leaving an underwater crater 6240 ft (1.9 km)
wide and 164 ft (50 m) deep where the island had once been.
Truman had initially tried to create a media blackout about the
test—hoping it would not become an issue in the upcoming
presidential election—but on January 7, 1953, Truman announced the
development of the hydrogen bomb to the world as hints and
speculations of it were already beginning to emerge in the
press.
Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union exploded its first
thermonuclear device, designed by the physicist
Andrei Sakharov, on August 12, 1953, labeled
"
Joe-4" by the West. This created concern
within the U.S. government and military, because, unlike "Mike,"
the Soviet device was a deliverable weapon, which the U.S. did not
yet have. This first device though was arguably not a "true"
hydrogen bomb, and could only reach explosive yields in the
hundreds of kilotons (never reaching the megaton range of a
"staged" weapon). Still, it was a powerful propaganda tool for the
Soviet Union, and the technical differences were fairly oblique to
the American public and politicians.
Following the "Mike" blast by less than a year, "Joe-4" seemed to
validate claims that the bombs were inevitable and vindicate those
who had supported the development of the fusion program. Coming
during the height of
McCarthyism, the
effect was most pronounced by the security hearings in early 1954
which revoked former Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer of his
security clearance, on the grounds that he was unreliable, had not
supported the American hydrogen bomb program, and had made
long-standing, left-wing ties in the 1930s. Edward Teller
participated in the hearing as the only major scientist to testify
against Oppenheimer, a role which resulted in his virtual expulsion
from the physics community.
On
February 28, 1954, the U.S. detonated its first deliverable
thermonuclear weapon (which used isotopes of lithium as its fusion fuel), known as the "Shrimp"
device of the "Castle
Bravo
" test, at Bikini Atoll
, Marshall
Islands. The device yielded 15 megatons of energy,
over twice its expected yield, and became the worst
radiological disaster in U.S.
history. The combination of the unexpectedly large blast and poor
weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive
nuclear fallout to contaminate over 7,000
square miles, including Marshall Island natives and the crew of a
Japanese fishing boat, as a snow-like mist. The contaminated
islands were evacuated (and are still uninhabitable), but the
natives received enough of a radioactive dose that they suffered
far elevated levels of
cancer and
birth defects in the years to come.
The crew of the Japanese fishing boat,
Lucky Dragon 5, returned to port
suffering from
radiation sickness
and skin burns. Their cargo, many tons of contaminated fish,
managed to enter into the market before the cause of their illness
was determined. When a crew member died from the sickness and the
full results of the contamination were made public by the U.S.,
Japanese concerns were reignited about the hazards of radiation and
resulted in a boycott on eating fish (a main staple of the island
country) for some weeks.
The hydrogen bomb age had a profound effect on the thoughts of
nuclear war in the popular and
military mind. With only fission bombs, nuclear war could be
considered something which could easily be "limited." Dropped by
planes and only able to destroy the most built up areas of major
cities, it was possible to consider fission bombs simply a
technological extension of previous wartime bombing (such as the
extensive
firebombing which took place
against Japan and Germany during World War II), and claims that
such weapons could lead to worldwide death or harm were easily
brushed aside as grave exaggeration.
Even the decades before the development of fission weapons there
had been speculation about the possibility for human beings to end
all life on the planet by either accident or purposeful
maliciousness, but technology had never allowed for such a
capacity. The far greater power of hydrogen bombs made this seem
ever closer.
The "Castle Bravo" incident itself raised a number of questions
about the survivability of a nuclear war. Government scientists in
both the U.S. and the USSR had insisted that fusion weapons, unlike
fission weapons, were "cleaner" as fusion reactions did not result
in the dangerously radioactive by-products as did fission
reactions. While technically true, this hid a more gruesome point:
the last stage of a multi-staged hydrogen bomb often used the
neutrons produced by the fusion reactions to induce fissioning in a
jacket of natural uranium, and provided around half of the yield of
the device itself.
This fission stage made fusion weapons considerably more "dirty"
than they were made out to be, a fact made evident by the towering
cloud of deadly fallout which followed the "Bravo" test. When the
Soviet Union tested its first megaton device in 1955, the
possibility of a limited nuclear war seemed even more remote in the
public and political mind: even if a city or country was not the
direct target of a nuclear attack, the clouds of fallout and
harmful fission products would disperse along with normal weather
patterns and embed themselves in the soil and water of non-targeted
areas of the planet as well.
Speculation began to look towards what would happen as the fallout
and dust created by a full-scale nuclear exchange would affect the
world as a whole, rather than just the cities and countries which
had been directly involved. In this way, the fate of the world was
now tied to the fate of the bomb-wielding superpowers.
Deterrence and brinkmanship
- See the main articles at Nuclear
testing, Nuclear strategy, and
Nuclear warfare.
Throughout the
1950s and the early
1960s a number of trends were enacted between the U.S.
and the USSR as they both endeavored in a tit-for-tat approach to
disallow the other power from acquiring nuclear supremacy. This
took form in a number of ways, both technologically and
politically, and had massive political and cultural effects during
the
Cold War.
The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
large, custom-made devices, requiring highly trained personnel for
their arming and deployment. They could be dropped only from the
largest bomber planes—at the time the
B-29 Superfortress—and each plane could
only hold a single bomb in its hold.
The first hydrogen bombs were similarly massive and complicated.
This ratio of one plane to one bomb was still fairly impressive in
comparison with conventional, non-nuclear weapons, but against
other nuclear-armed countries it was considered to be a grave
danger. In the immediate postwar years, the U.S. expended much
effort on making the bombs "G.I.-proof"—capable of being used and
deployed by members of the U.S. Army, rather than Nobel
Prize–winning scientists, and in the 1950s a program of
nuclear testing was undertaken in order to
improve the nuclear arsenal.
Starting
in 1951, the Nevada Test
Site
(in the Nevada
desert)
became the primary location for all U.S. nuclear testing (in the
USSR, Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan
served a similar role). Tests were divided
into two primary categories: "weapons related" (verifying that a
new weapon worked or looking at exactly how it worked) and "weapons
effects" (looking at how weapons behaved under various conditions
or how structures behaved when subjected to weapons).
In the
beginning, almost all nuclear tests were either "atmospheric"
(conducted above ground, in the atmosphere) or "underwater" (such as some
of the tests done in the Marshall Islands). Testing was used as a sign of both national
and technological strength, but also raised questions about the
safety of the tests, which released nuclear fallout into the atmosphere (most
dramatically with the Castle Bravo test in 1954, but in more limited amounts with
almost all atmospheric nuclear testing).
Because testing was seen as a sign of technological development
(the ability to design usable weapons without some form of testing
was considered dubious), halts on testing were often called for as
stand-ins for halts in the
nuclear
arms race itself, and many prominent scientists and statesmen
lobbied for a ban on nuclear testing.
In 1958, the U.S.,
USSR, and the United
Kingdom (a new nuclear power) declared a temporary testing
moratorium for both political and health reasons, but by 1961 the
Soviet Union had broken the moratorium and both the USSR and the
U.S. began testing with great frequency.
As a show
of political strength, the Soviet Union tested the largest-ever
nuclear weapon in October 1961, the massive Tsar Bomba
, which was tested in a reduced state with a yield
of around 50 megatons—in its full state it
was estimated to have been around 100 Mt. The weapon was
largely impractical for actual military use, but was hot enough to
induce
third-degree burns at a
distance of 62 mi (100 km) away. In its full, "dirty" design,
it would have increased the amount of worldwide fallout since 1945
by 25%.
In 1963, all nuclear and many non-nuclear states signed the
Limited Test Ban Treaty,
pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere,
underwater, or in outer space. The treaty permitted underground
tests.
Most tests were considerably more modest, and worked for direct
technical purposes as well as their potential political overtones.
Weapons improvements took on two primary forms. One was an increase
in efficiency and power, and within only a few years fission bombs
were being developed which were many times more powerful than the
ones created during World War II. The other was a program of
miniaturization, reducing the size of the nuclear weapons
themselves.
Smaller bombs meant that bombers could carry more of them, and thus
become even more of a threat against even the most rigorous air
defenses, and they could also be used in conjunction with the
development in
rocketry during the 1950s
and 1960s.
U.S. rocket efforts had received a large
boost in the postwar years, largely from the acquiring of engineers
who had worked on the Nazi rocketry program during the war, such as
Wernher von Braun, who had been
involved in the design and manufacture of the V-2 rockets which were launched across the
English
Channel
. An American program,
Project Paperclip, had endeavored to move
scientists of this sort into American hands (and kept out of Soviet
hands) and put them to work on projects for the U.S.
Weapons improvement
The first nuclear-tipped rockets, such as the
MGR-1 Honest John, first deployed by the
U.S. in 1953, were surface-to-surface missiles with relatively
short ranges (around 15 mi/25 km maximum) with yields around
twice the size of the first fission weapons. The limited range of
these weapons meant that they could only be used in certain types
of potential military situations—the U.S. rocket weapons could not,
for example, threaten the city of Moscow with the threat of an
immediate strike, and could only be used as "tactical" weapons
(that is, for small-scale military situations).
For "strategic" weapons—weapons which would serve to threaten an
entire country—for the time being, only long-range bombers capable
of penetrating deep into enemy territory would work.
In the U.S. this
resulted in the creation of the Strategic Air Command in 1946, a
system of bombers headed by General Curtis LeMay (who had previously presided over
the firebombing of Japan
during WWII), which kept a number of nuclear-armed
planes in the sky at all times, ready to receive orders to attack
Moscow whenever commanded.
These technological possibilities enabled
nuclear strategy to develop a logic
considerably different than previous military thinking had allowed.
Because the threat of
nuclear
warfare was so awful, it was first thought that it might make
any war of the future impossible. President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's doctrine of "massive
retaliation" in the early years of the Cold War was a message to
the USSR, saying that if the Red Army
attempted to invade the parts of Europe not given to the Eastern bloc during the Potsdam Conference
(such as West
Germany
), nuclear weapons would be used against the Soviet
troops and potentially the Soviet leaders.
With the development of more rapid-response technologies (such as
rockets and long-range bombers), this policy began to shift. If the
Soviet Union also had nuclear weapons and a policy of "massive
retaliation" was carried out, it was reasoned, then any Soviet
forces not killed in the initial attack, or launched while the
attack was ongoing, would be able to serve their own form of
nuclear "retaliation" against the U.S. Recognizing this to be an
undesirable outcome, military officers and
game theorists at the
RAND
think tank developed a nuclear warfare
strategy that would eventually become known as
Mutually Assured Destruction
(MAD).
MAD divided potential nuclear war into two stages:
first strike and
second strike. A first strike would be the
first use of nuclear weapons by one nuclear-equipped nation against
another nuclear-equipped nation. If the attacking nation did not
prevent the attacked nation from a nuclear response, then a second
strike could be deployed against the attacking nation. In this
situation, whether the U.S. first attacked the USSR or the USSR
first attacked the U.S., the end result would be that both nations
would be damaged perhaps to the point of utter social
collapse.
According to game theory, because starting a nuclear war would be
suicidal, no logical country would willfully enter into a nuclear
war. However, if a country were capable of launching a first strike
which would utterly destroy the ability of the attacked country to
respond in kind, then the balance of power would be disturbed and
nuclear war could then be safely undertaken.
MAD played on two seemingly opposed modes of thought: cold logic
and emotional fear. The phrase by which MAD was often known,
"nuclear deterrence", was translated as "dissuasion" by the French
and "terrorization" by the Russians. This apparent paradox of
nuclear war was summed up by British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill as "the worse things
get, the better they are"—the greater the threat of mutual
destruction, the safer the world would be.
This philosophy made a number of technological and political
demands on participating nations. For one thing, it said that it
should always be assumed that an enemy nation may be trying to
acquire "first strike capability," something which must always be
avoided. In American politics this translated into demands to avoid
"missile gaps" and "bomber gaps" where the Soviet Union could
potentially "out shoot" American efforts (most of these supposed
"gaps" proved to be political figments, but this hardly mattered at
the time). It also encouraged the production of thousands of
nuclear weapons by both the U.S. and the USSR, far more than would
be needed to simply destroy the major civilian and military
infrastructures of the opposing country.
These policies and strategies were satirized in the 1964
Stanley Kubrick film
Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets,
unable to keep up with the US's first strike capability, instead
plan for MAD by building a
Doomsday
Machine, and thus, after a (literally) mad US General orders a
nuclear attack on the USSR, the end of the world is brought
about.
The policy also encouraged the development of the first
early warning systems. Conventional
war, even at its fastest, was fought over time scales of days and
weeks. With long-range bombers, the time from the start of an
attack to its conclusion was reduced to mere hours. With rockets,
it could be reduced to minutes. It was reasoned that conventional
command and control
systems could not be expected to adequately respond to a nuclear
attack, and so great lengths were taken to develop the first
computers which could look for enemy
attacks and direct rapid responses.
In the U.S., massive funding was poured into the development of
SAGE, a system
which would track and intercept enemy bomber aircraft using
information from remote
radar stations, and
was the first computer system to feature
real-time processing,
multiplexing, and
display devices—the first "general" computing
machine, and a direct predecessor of modern computers.
Anti-nuclear
Bombers and short-range rockets were not reliable: planes could be
shot down, and earlier nuclear missiles could cover only a limited
range— for example, the first Soviet rockets' range limited them to
targets in Europe. However, by the
1960s, both
the United States and the Soviet Union had developed
intercontinental ballistic
missiles, which could be launched from extremely remote areas
far away from their target; and
submarine-launched
ballistic missiles, which had less range but could be launched
from submarines very close to the target without any radar warning.
This made any national protection from nuclear missiles
increasingly impractical.
The military realities made for a precarious diplomatic situation.
The international politics of
brinkmanship led leaders to exclaim their
willingness to participate in a nuclear war rather than concede any
advantage to their opponents, feeding public fears that their
generation may be the last.
Civil
defense programs undertaken by both superpowers, exemplified by
the construction of
fallout
shelters and urging civilians about the "survivability" of
nuclear war, did little to ease public concerns.
The
climax of brinksmanship came in early 1962, when an American
U-2 spy plane photographed a series of
launch sites for medium-range ballistic missiles being constructed on
the island of Cuba
, just off
the coast of the southern United States, beginning what became
known as the Cuban Missile
Crisis. The U.S. administration of
John F. Kennedy concluded that the Soviet
Union, then led by
Nikita
Khrushchev, was planning to station Russian nuclear missiles on
the island, which was under the control of Communist
Fidel Castro. On
October
22, Kennedy announced the discoveries in a televised address,
and declared that a naval
quarantine
would be put around Cuba to turn back any Soviet nuclear shipments,
and warned that the military was prepared "for any eventualities."
The missiles would have a range of 2,400 miles (4,000 km), and
allow the Soviet Union to easily destroy many major American cities
on the
Eastern Seaboard if a
nuclear war were started.
The leaders of the two superpowers stood nose to nose, seemingly
poised over the beginnings of a
third
world war.
Khrushchev's ambitions for putting the
weapons on the island were motivated in part by the fact that the
U.S. had stationed similar weapons in Britain, Italy
, and nearby
Turkey
, and had
previously attempted to sponsor an invasion of Cuba the year before
in the failed Bay of Pigs
Invasion. On
October 26, an
offer was sent from Khrushchev to Kennedy offering to withdraw all
missiles if Kennedy would commit to a policy of no future invasions
of Cuba. Khrushchev worded the threat of assured destruction
eloquently:
- "You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which
you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the
tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is
tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of
untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would
mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand
perfectly what dreaded forces our two countries possess."
A day later, however, the Russians put forward another offer, this
time demanding that the U.S. remove its missiles from Turkey before
any missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba. On the same day, a U-2
plane was shot down over Cuba and another was almost intercepted
over Russia, and Soviet merchant ships were nearing the quarantine
zone. Kennedy responded by accepting the first deal publicly, and
sending his brother
Robert to the
Soviet embassy to accept the second deal in private.
On
October 28, the Soviet ships stopped
at the quarantine line and, after some hesitation, turned back
towards the Soviet Union. Khrushchev announced that he had ordered
the removal of all missiles in Cuba, and U.S. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk was moved to comment, "We went
eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."
The Crisis was later seen as the closest the U.S. and the USSR ever
came to nuclear war and had been narrowly averted by last-minute
compromise by both superpowers. Fears of communication difficulties
led to the installment of the first
hotline,
a direct link between the superpowers which would allow them to
more easily discuss future military activities and political
maneuverings. It had been made clear that with their missiles,
bombers, submarines, and computerized firing systems, the
escalation of any situation to Armageddon could be done far more
easily than anybody desired.
After stepping so close to the brink, both the U.S. and the USSR
worked to reduce their nuclear tensions in the years immediately
following. The most immediate culmination of this work was the
signing of the
Partial Test Ban
Treaty in 1963, in which the U.S. and USSR agreed to no longer
test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer
space. Testing underground continued, allowing for further weapons
development, but the worldwide fallout risks were purposefully
reduced, and the era of using massive nuclear tests as a form of
saber-rattling ended.
In December 1979, NATO decided to deploy cruise and Pershing II
missiles in Western Europe in response to Soviet deployment of
intermediate range mobile missiles, and in the early 1980s, a
"dangerous Soviet-US nuclear confrontation" arose. In New York on
June 12, 1982, one million people gathered to protest nuclear
weapons, and to support the second UN Special Session on
Disarmament.
As the nuclear abolitionist movement grew,
there were many protests at the Nevada Test Site. For example, on February 6, 1987, nearly
2,000 demonstrators, including six members of Congress, protested
against nuclear weapons testing and more than 400 people were
arrested. Four of the significant groups organizing this renewal of
anti-nuclear
activism were
Greenpeace, The
American Peace Test, The Western Shoshone, and
Nevada Desert Experience.
Initial proliferation
In the fifties and sixties, three more countries joined the
"nuclear club."
The United Kingdom had been an integral part of the
Manhattan Project following the
Quebec Agreement in 1943. The passing of
the
McMahon Act by the United States in
1946 unilaterally broke this partnership and prevented the passage
of any further information to the United Kingdom. The British
Government under
Clement Attlee
determined that it would be essential for there to be a British
Bomb. Because of the involvement in the Manhattan Project Britain
had extensive knowledge in some areas, but not in others.
An
improved version of 'Fat Man' was developed, and on 26th February
1952, Prime Minister Winston
Churchill announced that the United Kingdom also had an atomic
bomb and a successful test
took place on the 3rd October 1952. At first
these were free-fall bombs and then there was a missile,
Blue Steel, and a later-canceled
MRBM,
Blue Streak. Anglo-American cooperation
on Nuclear weapons was restored by the
1958 US-UK Mutual Defence
Agreement. As a result of this and the
Polaris Sales Agreement, the United
Kingdom has bought United States designs for submarine missiles and
fitted its own warheads. It retains full independent control over
the use of the missiles. It no longer possesses any free-fall
bombs.
France had been heavily involved in nuclear research before
World War II through the work of the
Joliot-Curies. This was discontinued
after the war because of the instability of the
Fourth Republic and the lack of
finance available. However, in the 1950s a civil nuclear research
program was started, a byproduct of which would be plutonium.
In 1956 a secret Committee for the Military Applications of Atomic
Energy was formed and a development program for delivery vehicles
started. With the return of
Charles de
Gaulle to the presidency of France in 1958 the final decisions
to build a bomb were taken, and a successful test took place in
1960. Since then France has developed and maintained its own
nuclear deterrent.
In
1951 China and the Soviet Union signed an
agreement whereby China would supply uranium ore in exchange for
technical assistance in producing nuclear weapons. In 1953 China
had established a research program under the guise of civilian
nuclear energy. Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union provided
large amounts of equipment, but as the relations between the two
countries worsened, the amount of assistance was reduced, and in
1959 the donation of a bomb for copying purposes was refused.
Despite
this, rapid progress was made with the test of an atomic bomb on
the 16th October 1964 at Lop
Nur
, a nuclear missile on 25th October 1966, and of a
hydrogen bomb on the 14th June 1967.
Nuclear warheads were produced from 1968 and thermonuclear warheads
from 1974. It is also thought that Chinese warheads have been
successfully miniaturised from 2200 kg to 700 kg through
the use of designs obtained by
espionage
from the United States. The current number of weapons is unknown
owing to strict secrecy, but it is thought that up to 2000 warheads
may have been produced, though far fewer may be available for use.
China is the only nuclear weapons state to have guaranteed the
non-first use of nuclear weapons.
Cold War
After World War II, the
balance of power
between the Eastern and Western blocs, resulting in the fear of
global destruction, prevented the further military use of atomic
bombs. This fear was even a central part of
Cold War strategy, referred to as the doctrine of
Mutually Assured
Destruction ("MAD" for short).
So important was this balance to
international political stability that a treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
(or ABM treaty), was signed by the U.S. and the USSR in 1972 to curtail the development of defenses
against nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles which carry
them. This doctrine resulted in a large increase in the
number of nuclear weapons, as each side sought to ensure it
possessed the firepower to destroy the opposition in all possible
scenarios and against all perceived threats.
Early delivery systems for nuclear devices were primarily bombers
like the United States
B-29
Superfortress and
Convair B-36, and
later the
B-52 Stratofortress.
Ballistic missile systems, based on
Wernher von Braun's World War II designs
(specifically the
V2 rocket), were
developed by both United States and Soviet Union teams (in the case
of the U.S., effort was directed by the German scientists and
engineers although the Soviet Union also made extensive use of
captured German scientists, engineers, and technical data).
These systems, after testing, were used to launch satellites, such
as
Sputnik, and to propel the
Space Race, but they were primarily developed to
create the capability of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
(
ICBMs) with which nuclear powers could deliver
that destructive force anywhere on the globe. These systems
continued to be developed throughout the
Cold
War, although plans and treaties, beginning with the Strategic
Arms Limitation Treaty (
SALT I), restricted
deployment of these systems until, after the fall of the Soviet
Union, system development essentially halted, and many weapons were
disabled and destroyed (see
nuclear
disarmament).
There have been a number of potential nuclear disasters.
Following
air accidents U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost near Atlantic
City, New Jersey
(1957); Savannah, Georgia
(1958) (see Tybee Bomb
); Goldsboro, North Carolina
(1961); off the coast of Okinawa
(1965); in the sea near Palomares
, Spain
(1966)
(see 1966
Palomares B-52 crash
); and near Thule, Greenland
(1968) (see 1968 Thule
Air Base B-52 crash
). Most of the lost weapons were recovered,
the Spanish device after three months' effort by the
DSV Alvin and
DSV
Aluminaut.
The Soviet Union was less forthcoming about such incidents, but the
environmental group
Greenpeace believes
that there are around forty non-U.S. nuclear devices that have been
lost and not recovered, compared to eleven lost by America, mostly
in submarine disasters.
The U.S. has tried to recover Soviet
devices, notably in the 1974 Operation Jennifer
using the specialist salvage vessel Hughes Glomar
Explorer.
On January 27, 1967, more than 60 nations signed the
Outer Space Treaty, banning nuclear
weapons in space.
The end of the
Cold War failed to end the
threat of nuclear weapon use, although global fears of
nuclear war reduced substantially.
In a
major move of de-escalation, Boris
Yeltsin, on January 26, 1992, announced that Russia
planned to
stop targeting United
States cities with nuclear weapons.
Second nuclear age
Although it had started before the end of the
Cold War, the
second nuclear age -
proliferation of nuclear
weapons among lesser powers and for reasons other than the
American-Soviet rivalry - really began with the end of the Cold
War.
India's first atomic-test explosion was in 1974 with
Smiling Buddha, which it described as a
"peaceful nuclear explosion".
India
tested
fission and perhaps fusion devices in 1998, and Pakistan
successfully tested fission devices that same year,
raising concerns that they would use nuclear weapons on each
other. All of the former Soviet bloc countries with
nuclear weapons (Belarus
, Ukraine
, and Kazakhstan) returned their warheads to Russia by
1996.
In
January 2004, Pakistani metallurgist and weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed to having been
a part of an international proliferation network of materials,
knowledge, and machines from Pakistan to Libya
, Iran
, and
North
Korea
.
South Africa also had an active program
to develop uranium-based nuclear weapons, but dismantled its
nuclear weapon program in the
1990s. It is not
believed that it actually tested such a weapon though it later
claimed to have constructed several crude devices which it
eventually dismantled. In the late
1970s
American spy satellites detected a "brief, intense, double flash of
light near the southern tip of Africa."
Known as the Vela Incident
, it was speculated to have been a South African or
possibly Israeli nuclear weapons test, though some feel that it may
have been caused by natural events.
Israel
is widely
believed to possess an arsenal of potentially up to several hundred
nuclear warheads, but this has never been officially confirmed or
denied (though the existence of their Dimona
nuclear facility
were confirmed by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986).
North Korea announced in 2003 that it also had several nuclear
explosives though it has not been confirmed and the validity of
this has been a subject of scrutiny amongst weapons experts.
The first
detonation of a nuclear weapon by the
Democratic
People's Republic of Korea was the
2006
North Korean nuclear test
, conducted on October 9, 2006. On the 25th
of May 2009 North Korea continued nuclear testing, violating
United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1718.
In
Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use
of nuclear weapons on August 9,
2005. The full text of the
fatwa was
released in an official statement at the meeting of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Despite this,
however, there is mounting concern in many nations about Iran's
refusal to halt its nuclear power program, which many (including
some members of the US Government) fear is a cover for weapons
development. (See
Iran and weapons of mass
destruction)
See also
References
- The first nuclear programs
- Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives
and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward
Teller (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2002). [33300]
- David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and
Atomic Energy 1939-1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995).
- Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The
Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995).
- Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
- Henry DeWolf Smyth,
Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1945). (Smyth
Report) [33301]
- Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for
Nuclear Power, 1939-1949 (London: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
- Nuclear weapons and energy in culture
- Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
- Nuclear arsenals and capabilities
- Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret
History, (Arlington, TX: Aerofax, 1988).
- Chuck Hansen, The Swords of Armageddon: U.S. nuclear
weapons development since 1945, (Sunnyvale, CA: Chukelea
Publications, 1995). [33302]
- Stephen Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and
Consequences of U. S. Nuclear Weapons Since
1940 (Brookings Institution Press, 1998). [33303]
- Second nuclear age
- Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age, (Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1999), [33304]
- Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age, Foreign Affairs,
January/February 2000, [33305]
External links
.jpg/300px-Fallout_map_USA_(FEMA).jpg)
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
