Nuclear arms race

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US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945-2005.

Nuclear weapons
History of nuclear weapons
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Nuclear arms race
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The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear weapons between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War. During the Cold War, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, a few allies of both nations also possessed nuclear weapons. An additional nuclear arms race developed between India and Pakistan during the end of the 1990s.

World War II

The Soviet Union, despite being an ally, was not informed of the American experiments until the Potsdam Conference in 1945. The Americans did not trust the Soviets to keep the information from German spies; there was also deep distrust of the Soviets and their intentions, despite the wartime partnership. Even during the war many government and military figures in the USA saw the USSR as a potential enemy in the future.

The Soviets were well aware of the program due to a spy ring operating within the American nuclear program. The atomic spies (including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall), as they became known, kept Stalin well informed of American developments. When U.S. Vice President Harry S. Truman informed Stalin of the weapons, he was surprised at how calmly Stalin took the news and thought that Stalin had not understood what he had told him. In fact Stalin had long been aware of the program. The American program had been so secret that even Truman did not know about the weapons until he became president; Stalin had thus known about the Manhattan Project before Truman himself did.

In August of 1945 Truman ordered two bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ostensibly to quickly end the war though questions have remained about additional motivations as well (see Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Early Cold War

Behind the scenes the Soviet regime was working furiously to build their own atomic weapons. During the war Soviet efforts had been limited by a lack of uranium, but new supplies in Eastern Europe were taken and provided a steady supply while the Soviets developed a domestic source. Physicists were given massive funding and treated like royalty, but were also threatened with being shot if they did not make significant progress. The much feared NKVD head Lavrenty Beria was put in charge of the development process. The Soviet effort was aided in this effort by information provided by their spies in the United States, however the information was not freely given to scientists and was instead used as an additional "check" on their progress (Beria did not trust the scientists, and he did not trust the espionage). While American thinkers had predicted that the USSR would not have nuclear weapons until the mid-1950s, the first Soviet bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949, shocking the entire world. The weapon (called "Joe One" by the West) was more or less a copy of the weapon which the United States had dropped on Japan ("Fat Man").

Both governments devoted massive amounts of resources to increasing the quality and quantity of their nuclear arsenal. Both nations quickly began work on hydrogen bombs and the United States detonated the first such device on November 1, 1952. Again the Soviets surprised the Americans by exploding a deployable thermonuclear device of their own the next August, though it was not actually a "true" multi-stage hydrogen bomb (that would wait until 1954). The Soviet H-bomb was almost completely a product of domestic research, as their espionage sources in the USA had only worked on very preliminary (and incorrect) versions of the hydrogen bomb.

Delivery methods, such as the bomber fleets, were also expanded. The United States began with a considerable lead in this area, but the widespread introduction of jet powered interceptor aircraft upset this balance somewhat by reducing the effectiveness of the US bomber fleet. In 1949 Curtis LeMay was placed in command of the Strategic Air Command and started a program to update the bomber fleet to one that was all-jet. During the early 1950s the B-47 and B-52 were introduced, giving the US the ability to convincingly penetrate the USSR.

The most important development in terms of delivery in the 1950s was the introduction of ICBMs. Missiles had long been seen as the ideal platform for nuclear weapons and in 1957 on the 4th of October with the launch of Sputnik the Soviet Union showed the world that they had missiles that could hit anywhere in the world. The United States launched their own on the 31 October 1959.

The period also saw attempts begin to defend against nuclear weapons. Both powers built large radar arrays to detect incoming bombers and missiles. Fighters to use against bombers and anti-ballistic missiles to use against ICBMs were also developed. Large underground bunkers were constructed to save the leadership of the superpowers, and individuals were told to build fallout shelters and taught how to react to a nuclear attack (civil defense).

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)

Both Soviet and American thinkers hoped to use nuclear weapons to extract concessions from the other side, or from other powers such as China, but the risk of any use of these weapons were so large that both sides refrained from what John Foster Dulles referred to as brinkmanship. While some like General Douglas MacArthur argued nuclear weapons should be used during the Korean War both Truman and Eisenhower disagreed.

Both sides were also unaware of how their relative arsenals compared. The Americans tended to be lacking in confidence, earlier in the 1950s they believed in a non-existent "bomber gap" (aerial photography later discovered that the Soviets had been playing a sort of Potemkin village game with their bombers in their military parades, flying them in large circles to make it appear they had far more than they truly did), and the 1960 American presidential election saw accusations of a wholly spurious "missile gap" between the Soviets and the Americans. The Soviet government structure tended to exaggerate the power of Soviet weapons to the leadership and Nikita Khrushchev.

An additional controversy formed in the United States during the early-1960s over whether or not it was known if their weapons would work at all if it came down to it. All of the individual components of nuclear missiles had been tested separately (warheads, navigation systems, rockets), but it had been infeasible to test them all as a whole. Critics charged that it was not really known how a warhead would function in the gravity forces and temperature differences encountered in the upper atmosphere and outer space, and Kennedy was unwilling to run a risky test of an ICBM with a live warhead. The closest thing to an actual test, Operation Frigate Bird, which involved testing a live submarine launched ballistic missile, was challenged by critics (including Curtis LeMay, who used doubt over missile accuracy to encourage the development of new bombers) on the grounds that it was a single test (and could therefore be an anomaly), was a lower-altitude SLBM (and therefore was subject to different conditions than an ICBM), and that significant modifications had been made to its warhead before testing (as that particular warhead was known to be potentially prone to predetonation).

Détente

These treaties were only partially successful. Both states continued building massive numbers of nuclear weapons, and new technologies such as MIRVs limited the effectiveness of the treaties. Both superpowers retained the ability to destroy each other many times over.

Reagan and Star Wars

Post-Cold War

After the Cold War ended, a large amount of resources and money which was once spent on developing nuclear weapons was then spent on repairing the environmental damage produced by the nuclear arms race, and almost all former production sites are now major cleanup sites. In the USA, the plutonium production facility at Hanford, Washington and the uranium molding facility at Rocky Flats, Colorado are among the most polluted sites.

India and Pakistan

Milestone nuclear explosions

Date	Name	Yield (kt)	Country	Significance
Jul 16 1945	Trinity test>Trinity	19	USA	First fission weapon test
Aug 6 1945	Little Boy	15	USA	Bombing of Hiroshima, Japan
Aug 9 1945	Fat Man	21	USA	Bombing of Nagasaki, Japan
Aug 29 1949	Joe 1	22	USSR	First fission weapon test by the USSR
Oct 3 1952	Operation Hurricane>Hurricane	25	UK	First fission weapon test by the UK
Nov 1 1952	Ivy Mike	10,200	USA	First "staged" thermonuclear weapon test (not deployable)
Aug 12 1953	Joe 4	400	USSR	First fusion weapon test by the USSR (not "staged", but deployable)
Mar 1 1954	Castle Bravo	15,000	USA	fallout accident
Nov 22 1955	RDS-37	1,600	USSR	First "staged" thermonuclear weapon test by the USSR (deployable)
Nov 8 1957	Operation Grapple>Grapple X	1,800	UK	First (successful) "staged" thermonuclear weapon test by the UK
Feb 13 1960	France and weapons of mass destruction>Gerboise Bleue	60	France	First fission weapon test by France
Oct 31 1961	Tsar Bomba	50,000	USSR	Largest thermonuclear weapon ever tested
Oct 16 1964	596 (nuclear test)>596	22	China	First fission weapon test by China
Jun 17 1967	China and weapons of mass destruction>Test No. 6	3,300	China	First "staged" thermonuclear weapon test by China
Aug 24 1968	Canopus (nuclear test)>Canopus	2,600	France	First "staged" thermonuclear test by France
May 18 1974	Smiling Buddha	12	India	First fission nuclear explosive test by India
May 11 1998	Operation Shakti>Shakti I	43	India	First potential fusion/boosted weapon test by India (exact yields disputed, between 25kt and 45kt)
May 13 1998	Operation Shakti>Shakti II	12	India	First fission "weapon" test by India
May 28 1998	Pakistan and weapons of mass destruction>Chagai-I	9	Pakistan	First fission weapon test by Pakistan

"Deployable" refers to whether the device tested could be hypothetically used in actual combat (in contrast with a proof-of-concept device). "Staging" refers to whether it was a "true" hydrogen bomb of the so-called Teller-Ulam configuration or simply a form of a boosted fission weapon. For a more complete list of nuclear test series, see List of nuclear tests. Some exact yield estimates, such as that of the Tsar Bomba and the tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, are somewhat contested among specialists.

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See also

• Nuclear warfare
• Nuclear disarmament
• Space race

NATO

United States

Winston Churchill

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