Standfirst. Joseph Stalin lost his temper when he was told that the US had dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. He was very angry because he didn’t have the bomb. On 7 August 1945, he appointed Lavrenti Beria, the chief of Soviet secret police and wartime deputy premier, to head his A-bomb project. This crash programme led to the explosion of ‘Joe One’ (Stalin’s first A-bomb named after him) in the early morning of 29 August 1949 (Monday, year of the Ox).
“No one had expected a Soviet bomb so soon,” said Stanislaw Ulam, Polish émigré mathematician at Los Alamos. “it was quite a successful shot and it really shocked people.”
Harry Truman, who had earlier refused to believe that “those asiatics” could build one, now decided to pursue – “to go to it and fast” – the development of a much more powerful thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, which his scientists called the “Super.” One bomb then led to another. Within a decade, the US had more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union over 1,000 of them
Joe One broke the American four-year monopoly of atomic firepower. Slightly more than a month later, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Peking on 1 October 1949, sealing the Communist victory in mainland China.
Following the North Korean invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950, Truman adopted the NSC (National Security Council) 68 – America’s official statement on its Cold War strategy of containing Soviet power and the spread of Communism while continuing to consolidate American military strength – always viewed by the hawks in Washington to be woefully inadequate. To quote Henry Kissinger, the American guru on the global balance of power, commenting on the NSC 68 document at the time of its inception: “…American strength was, for a brief moment, unprecedentedly supreme, despite the fact that America had convinced itself that it was relatively weak militarily…”
On 1 November 1952 the US tested the world’s first thermonuclear bomb, and Mike exploded with a force of 10.4 megatons, one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The explosion vapourised the tiny island of Elugelab, and left behind a crater two hundred feet deep and more than one mile across.
The staged, radiation-imploded hydrogen bomb was co-invented by S. Ulam and Edward Teller, Hungarian-born theoretical physicist as well as a superhawk in the scientific community.
Nuclear historian Richard Rhodes has written that the American first staged thermonuclear Mike ”would change the course of history – but not in the direction of decisive US advantage that the H-bomb enthusiasts had fantasized.”
The Soviet Union had started work on the thermonuclear in 1946, even before the scientist spy Klaus Fuchs had passed information on the concept of the American superbomb to Soviet intelligence. A member of the British scientific team attached to the Manhattan project in Los Alamos, Fuchs had attended the secret conference held in mid-April 1946 to review the wartime work (begun in 1942) on the theoretical development of the thermonuclear bomb. In May the group of American scientists strongly in favour of the H-bomb reported that “a super bomb can be constructed and will work…” They also called for a proof of the pudding “by a test of the completely assembled super-bomb” (Mike successfully tested on 1 November 1952).
Stalin’s ambition to have the H-bomb as well had subsequently been rudely aroused by the nuclear threat in the 1948 Berlin crisis, the first major confrontation between East and West in the burgeoning Cold War. At that time only the US had atomic weapons, and in early May 1948 the US Air Force had planned to use 50 A-bombs (the entire American stockpile that spring) and to drop all of them on 20 Soviet cities. Truman, however, was reported to be extremely wary: “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to…”
Although the Soviet Union responded promptly by staging its own thermonuclear debut on 12 August 1953 (about ten and half months after Mike 1), Joe 4 had a yield of 400 kilotons – less than half a megaton, and was considered to be a boosted fission bomb, not quite a fusion bomb in the megaton category – not yet in the top class of a Super.
Nevertheless, I.V. Kurchatov, nuclear physicist and scientific director of the Soviet nuclear project (1943-60) promptly thanked and hailed A.D. Sakharov, theoretical physicist, as “the saviour of Russia.”
On 22 November 1955, three years after Mike, the SU had finally made it by testing a 1.6 MT H-bomb – co-invented by Sakharov and fellow theoretical physicist Y.B. Zeldovich. Their first fully-fledged H-bomb was technologically a younger cousin of the American Mike.
In 1953 the US had more than 1,400 nuclear weapons when the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear device Joe 4 on August. The Soviets had over 100 – only about one-tenth of the American atomic stockpile.
After touring the US Strategic Air Command bases in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Mississippi Senator John Stennis of the Senate Armed Services Committee reported on October 1953 that “we now have tremendous striking power on our own, which is growing daily, and any nation that commits an atomic attack on us, in my opinion, is committing a suicidal act unless it should wipe us out at the first blow. This is, of course, impossible.
“Great as our problems of defense may be, Russia’s problems are far greater and our own striking power is far greater than hers. She is bound to recognize our overwhelming power of retaliation.”
His assessment of the preponderance of American nuclear might later proved to be right when the Soviet leader Chairman Khrushchev involuntarily blinked and retreated in the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. For all his brashness and bravado, he had the goodness as well as survival instinct to shy away from a nuclear showdown that could well engulf the whole of humanity in its apocalyptic flames.
“Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms?” asked President Ronald Regan when he addressed the British Parliament at Westminster Palace in London on 8 June 1982. 11.01.2014 17:57
Towards the end of 1953, a group of top intelligence analysts in Washington came to the conclusion that the Soviets were also developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). “This proved to be the military intelligence of the greatest consequence since the end of World War II,” Simon Ramo has written. In 1953 he was asked by the Eisenhower administration to serve as the chief scientist to develop the American ICBM.
“It triggered a major shift in the nation’s national-security plans and brought about a crash effort to develop an American ICBM, a project that became the largest technical development ever attempted by the U.S. military, even exceeding in assigned resources the wartime Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb…”
Towards the end of 1957, the US tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) known as the Atlas, two months after the launching of Sputnik I on 4 October. This first man-made satellite signaled the capability of Soviet rocketry to deliver nuclear-armed missiles thousands of miles across the oceans to targets deep in the American heartland. Inevitably, it also triggered a space race between the two superpowers, and marked the start of the militarization of the high ground in the ‘coastal seas’ of near-Earth space. 11.01.2014 18:07
In 1960 the US started to deploy its first ICBM – the Atlas with a single warhead (2-5 MT), as well as its first SLBM (sea-launched ballistic missile) – the Polaris A-1 with a warhead of one megaton. The very same year, the Soviet Union also started deploying its first ICBM – the SS-6 with a single warhead (4 MT), and its first SLBM as well – the SS-N-4 with a single warhead (1 MT).
Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs published in the summer of 1953, Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and wartime director of Los Alamos Laboratory which designed and made the world’s first atomic bombs, lambasted the hawks for demanding ever-larger and more powerful arsenals. He wrote: “The very least we can conclude (looking ten years ahead) is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their (Soviet) two-thousandth.”
At the time of the Cuban missile crisis on October 1962, the US had more than 27,000 nuclear warheads, and the Soviet Union had over 3,000.
John Wheeler, another American theoretical physicist and a hawk to boot, didn’t agree with Oppenheimer. Wheeler had in 1939 developed and elucidated fission theory with Niels Bohr, Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, and then directed thermonuclear research at Princeton in 1950-51. Wheeler wrote: “Anybody who says 20,000 weapons are no better than 2,000 ought to read the history of wars.”
Was Wheeler right? Don’t forget that Oppenheimer was writing about atomic weapons with their awesome power of mass destruction. Director of the Manhattan project which produced the world’s first atomic bomb, he had opposed the development of the far more powerful and destructive hydrogen bomb – the thermonuclear, Teller’s so-called ‘Super’. 11.01.2014 18:25
“But nuclear weapons are not cannonballs; how many times could either country be destroyed?” Richard Rhodes has cogently commented. “And who would venture war in the face of total and redundant destruction?” 9.7.2009 2002 2018 11.01.2014 18:27
According to nuclear historians Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, more than 128,000 nuclear warheads have been built since 1945, about 98 percent of the total built by the two nuclear superpowers. The US has built about 55 percent of them (over 70,000 nuclear warheads), and the Soviet Union/Russia about 43 percent of the total number (some 50,000 nuclear warheads).
“Was that arms race necessary? By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well as weapons, it cost the United States $4 trillion – roughly the US national debt (government debt) in 1994 (about US$10 trillion in 2009). Soviet costs were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that triggered the USSR’s collapse,” nuclear historian extraordinary Richard Rhodes wrote in January 1995.
“Cold warriors have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and educational neglect.
“The potlatch theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers took of omnicidal war…”
In a warning message written in 1981 calling for a new sense of responsibility for global survival, Aurelio Peccei, the eminent president of the Club of Rome, wrote with philosophical calm and hard-headed acuity:
“In the military sphere, we have the power to unleash apocalyptic forces, but we must only hope that we are never forced to start using them, because we would not be able to stop.
“Indeed, while we have acquired the ultimate power to destroy ourselves with weapons of ultramodern technology, we still reason with a pre-technological mentality. We have remained at a tribal and barbaric level in many of our concepts.
“Face to face with new realities, we find ourselves in such a frightening state of mental confusion that we run the risk, before we know it, of being crushed beneath the weight of our stockpiled weapons, or annihilated in a nuclear holocaust launched by accident, outside of all projected scenarios…”
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