Nuclear weapons have enormous destructive power from nuclear fission or fission and joint fusion reactions. Building on the scientific breakthroughs created during the 1930s, the United States, Britain and Canada collaborated during World War II, in the so-called Manhattan Project, to counter the alleged Nazi German atomic bomb project. In August 1945, two fission bombs were dropped in Japan, standing to date as the sole use of nuclear weapons in combat. The Soviet Union began construction soon afterwards with their own atomic bomb project, and soon the two countries developed a stronger fusion weapon known as the "hydrogen bomb".
Video History of nuclear weapons
Fisika dan politik pada 1930-an dan 1940-an
In the first decade of the 20th century, physics underwent a revolution with the development of an understanding of the nature of atoms. In 1898, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered that pitchblende, the uranium ore, contained a substance - which they named radium - that emit large amounts of radioactivity. Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy identify that atoms are beginning to break down and transform into different elements. Hope appears among scientists and laypeople that the elements around us can contain large amounts of invisible energy, waiting to be exploited.
H. G. Wells was inspired to write about atomic weapons in a 1914 novel, The World Set Free , which appeared shortly before the First World War. In a 1924 article, Winston Churchill speculated about possible military implications: "Perhaps no bomb no larger than orange found to have the secret power to destroy the entire building block - it is impossible to concentrate the power of a thousand tonnes of cordite and municipal explosion with a stroke ? "
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and quickly became unsafe for Jewish scientists to remain in the country. LeÃÆ'³ SzilÃÆ'¡rd escaped to London where he proposed, and in 1934 patented, the idea of ​​a nuclear chain reaction through neutrons. The patent also introduces the term critical mass to describe the minimum amount of material needed to maintain a chain reaction and its potential to cause an explosion. (British Patent 630,726.) He was then assigned a patent to the British Admiralty so that it could be covered by the Official Secrets Act. In a very real sense, SzilÃÆ'¡rd is the father of atomic bombs academically. Also in 1934, IrÃÆ'¨ne and Frà © jÃÆ'  © ric Joliot-Curie found that artificial radioactivity could be induced in stable elements by bombarding it with alpha particles; Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons.
In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a script to Naturwissenschaften reporting that they had detected barium elements after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Lise Meitner and her niece, Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpret these results as a result of the separation of uranium atoms. (Frisch confirmed this experiment on January 13, 1939.) They gave the process the name "fission" because of its resemblance to the separation of cells into two new cells. Even before it was published, news of Meitner and Frisch's interpretations crossed the Atlantic. Scientists at Columbia University decided to mimic the experiment and on January 25, 1939, conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States in the basement of Pupin Hall. The following year, they identified the active component of uranium as a rare uranium-235 isotope.
Uranium appears in nature mainly in two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. When the uranium-235 nucleus absorbs the neutron, it undergoes nuclear fission, releases energy and, on average, 2.5 neutrons. Because uranium-235 releases more neutrons than absorbed, it can support chain reactions and is therefore described as fissile. Uranium-238, on the other hand, is not fissile because it usually does not undergo fission when absorbing neutrons.
By the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, from World War II, many of Europe's top scientists had fled the imminent conflict. Physicists on both sides are well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but no one is sure how it can be done. In August 1939, concerned that Germany may have its own project to develop a fission-based weapon, Albert Einstein signed a letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned him about the threat. Roosevelt responded by forming the Uranium Committee under Lyman James Briggs but, with a small initial funding ($ 6,000), progress was slow. Only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US decided to use the necessary resources.
The first organized research began in England as part of the Alloys Tube project. The Maud committee was founded following the work of Frisch and Rudolf Peierls who calculated the critical mass of uranium-235 and found that it was much smaller than previously thought which meant that bombs that could be delivered should be possible. In the Frisch-Peierls memorandum of February 1940 they declared that: "The energy liberated in such super-bomb explosions... will, for a moment, produce temperatures proportional to the interior of the sun.The explosion of such explosions destroys life in The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it will probably cover the center of the big city. "
Edgar Sengier, a director of the Shinkolobwe Mine in Congo that produces high-quality uranium ore in the world, has realized the possible use of uranium in a bomb. At the end of 1940, for fear of being confiscated by Germany, he sent a whole pile of ore to a warehouse on Staten Island.
For 18 months, British research surpassed America but by mid-1942 it became clear that the necessary industrial effort was beyond the British economy that had sprung up in wartime. In September 1942, General Leslie Groves was appointed to lead the US project which became known as the Manhattan Project. Two of his first actions were to get authorization to assign the highest priority AAA rating to the required procurement, and to order purchases of all 1,250 tonnes of Shinkolobwe ore. The Tube Alloys project was quickly taken over by US efforts and after Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Quebec Treaty in 1943, relocated and merged with the Manhattan Project.
Maps History of nuclear weapons
From Los Alamos to Hiroshima
With a scientific team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan project brings together some of today's top scientific thinking, including many exiles from Europe, with the power of American industrial production for the purpose of producing fission-based explosives before Germany. Britain and the United States agreed to collect their resources and information for the project, but other Allied forces, the Soviet Union (USSR), were not informed. The US made an unprecedented investment in a project that at the time was the largest industrial company ever seen, spread across more than 30 sites in the US and Canada. Scientific development is centered in a secret laboratory in Los Alamos.
For fission weapons to operate, there must be sufficient fissile material to support chain reactions, critical mass. To separate the uranium-235 isotope from non-fissile-238, two methods were developed that took advantage of the fact that uranium-238 had slightly larger atomic masses: electromagnetic separation and gas diffusion. Other secret sites are established in rural Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for large-scale production and purification of rare isotopes, which require large investments. At that time, the K-25, one of Oak Ridge's facilities, is the world's largest under one roof plant. The Oak Ridge site employs tens of thousands of people at its peak, most of whom do not know what they're doing.
Although uranium-238 can not be used for the early stages of an atomic bomb, when it absorbs neutrons, it becomes uranium-239 that decays into neptunium-239, and finally a relatively stable, non-existent plutonium-239. on Earth, but fissile like uranium-235. After Fermi achieved the world's first preserved and controlled nuclear chain reaction with the creation of the first atomic pile, a large reactor was secretly built in what is now known as the Hanford Site to convert uranium-238 into plutonium for a bomb.
The simplest form of nuclear weapons is the gun type fission weapon, in which the sub-critical mass will be shot at other sub-critical masses. The result is a super-critical mass and an uncontrollable chain reaction that will create the desired explosion. The weapons imagined in 1942 are two weapon types, Little Boy (uranium) and Thin Man (plutonium), and Fat Man plutonium implants.
In early 1943 Oppenheimer determined that two projects had to advance: the Thin Man project (plutonium gun) and the Fat Man project (plutonium implosion). The plutonium rifle is to receive most of the research effort, because it is the project with the most uncertainty involved. It is assumed that uranium type bombs can be adapted from it.
In December 1943, the British mission of 19 scientists arrived at Los Alamos. Hans Bethe became head of the Theoretical Division.
In April 1944 it was discovered by Emilio SegrÃÆ'¨ that the plutonium-239 produced by the Hanford reactor had an exorbitant level of neutron background radiation, and underwent spontaneous fission in a very small degree, due to the unexpected presence of plutonium-240 impurities. If such plutonium is used in a gun-type design, the chain reaction will begin within seconds before the critical mass is fully assembled, blowing apart weapons with results far lower than expected, in what is known as hiss.
As a result, Fat Man development has high priority. Chemical explosives are used to implant a sub-critical sphere of plutonium, thereby increasing its density and making it a critical mass. The difficulty with an explosion centered on the problem of making chemical explosives gives a very uniform shock wave to a plutonium ball - if it is even a little asymmetrical, it will weaken. This problem is solved by the use of an explosive lens that will focus the explosive waves inside the exploding ball, similar to the way the optical lens focuses the rays of light.
After D-Day, General Groves ordered the team of scientists to follow the Allied forces who had won eastward to Europe to assess the status of the German nuclear program (and to prevent the western-moving Soviets from obtaining scientific material or labor). They concluded that, while Germany had an atomic bomb program headed by Werner Heisenberg, the government did not make a significant investment in the project, and it did not work. Similarly, Japan's efforts in developing nuclear weapons have lacked resources. The Japanese Navy lost interest when a committee headed by Yoshio Nishina concluded in 1943 that "it might be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic force during the war".
Historians claim to have found a rough schematic showing the Nazi nuclear bomb. In March 1945, the German scientific team was directed by physicist Kurt Diebner to develop a primitive nuclear device in Ohrdruf, Thuringia. The final sewer study was conducted at the experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch.
On April 12, following the death of Roosevelt, Vice President Harry S. Truman occupied the presidency. At the time of unconditional surrender from Germany on May 8, 1945, the Manhattan Project was still a few months away from producing work weapons.
Due to the difficulty in making a working plutonium bomb, it was decided that there should be a weapon test. On July 16, 1945, in the northern desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first nuclear test took place, codenamed "Trinity", using a device dubbed "gadgets". The test, a plutonium-type explosive device, releases energy equivalent to 19 kilotons of TNT, much stronger than any weapon ever used before. The news of the success of the test rushed to Truman at the Potsdam Conference, where Churchill was briefed and Soviet Prime Minister Joseph Stalin was informed of the new weapon. On July 26, the Potsdam Declaration was issued containing an ultimatum for Japan: surrender or suffering "total and total destruction", although nuclear weapons are not mentioned.
After hearing arguments from scientists and military officers about the possible use of nuclear weapons against Japan (although some recommend using them as demonstrations in uninhabited areas, most recommended using them against established targets, the term euphemism for populated cities), Truman ordered the use of weapons in Japanese cities, hoping it would send a powerful message that would end with the capitulation of the Japanese leadership and avoid a long invasion of the islands. On May 10-11, 1945, the Target Committee at Los Alamos, led by Oppenheimer, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura as possible targets. Concerns about Kyoto's cultural heritage led to being replaced by Nagasaki.
On August 6, 1945, uranium-based weapon Little Boy was blown up over the city of Hiroshima in Japan, and three days later, a plutonium-based weapon, Fat Man, was detonated over Nagasaki city in Japan. To date, Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only two examples of nuclear weapons used in combat. The atomic attacks kill at least a hundred thousand Japanese civilians and military personnel directly, with heat, radiation, and explosive effects. Many tens of thousands will then die from radiation and cancer related diseases. Truman promised "rain of destruction" if the Japanese did not immediately surrender, threatening to systematically eliminate their ability to fight. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan.
Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet Union was not invited to share new weapons developed by the United States and other allies. During the war, information had flowed from a number of spy volunteers involved with the Manhattan Project (known as Soviet cable codenamed Enormoz), and Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov carefully. oversee the development of Allied weapons. It was not surprising for Stalin when Truman told him at the Potsdam conference that he had a "powerful new weapon". Truman was startled by Stalin's lack of interest.
Soviet spies in the US project are all volunteers and no one becomes Soviet citizen. One of the most valuable, Klaus Fuchs, is a German theoretical physicist ÃÆ'  © migrà ©  © who has been part of the early British nuclear effort and the British mission to Los Alamos. Fuchs has been heavily involved in the development of implosi weapons, and continued in great detail the cross-sections of the Trinity device to his Soviet contacts. Other Los Alamos spies - no one knows each other - including Theodore Hall and David Greenglass. The information was kept but not followed up, because the Soviet Union was still too busy fighting 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 Los Alamos scientists who have built bombs began calling for "international control of atomic energy," often calling for control either by transnational organizations or the distribution of weapons of destination information to all superpowers, but because of deep mistrust of the Soviet Union's intentions, both in postwar Europe and in general, US policymakers seek to secure America's nuclear monopoly.
A half-hearted plan for international control was proposed at the newly established UN by Bernard Baruch (The Baruch Plan), but certainly good for American commentators - and for the Soviets - that it was an attempt primarily to stem Soviet nuclear efforts. The Soviets vetoed the plan, effectively ending the immediate postwar negotiations on atomic energy, and made an offer to ban the use of atomic weapons in general.
The Soviets have put their industrial and human-power forces into the development of their own atomic weapons. The initial problem for the Soviets was primarily one of the resources - they were not looking for uranium resources in the Soviet Union and the US had made a deal to monopolize the largest known (and high purity) reserves in the Belgian Congo. The USSR used forced labor to mine old deposits in Czechoslovakia - now areas under their control - and look for other domestic deposits (eventually discovered).
Two days after the Nagasaki bombing, the US government released the official technical history of the Manhattan Project, written by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, known as the Smyth Report. Summaries that have been cleared of wartime efforts focus primarily on production facilities and investment scales, partly written to justify wartime spending to the American public.
The Soviet program, under the suspicious supervision of the former head of NKVD Lavrenty Beria (a participant and winner of the Great Stalin Purge in the 1930s), will use the Report as a blueprint, seeking to double as many American efforts as possible. The "secret cities" used for the Soviet Hanford and Oak Ridge Soviet equivalents completely disappeared from the map for decades to come.
In the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, Arzamas-16, physicist Yuli Khariton leads a scientific effort to develop weapons. Beria does not trust his scientists, and he does not believe in carefully collected espionage information. Thus, Beria commissioned several teams of scientists for the same task without notifying each team of its existence. If they come to different conclusions, Beria will unite them for the first time and get them to argue with their new associates. Beria uses espionage information as a way to reexamine his scientists' progress, and in his attempts to duplicate American projects even rejects more efficient bomb designs and supports people closer to emulating the proven and true Obese Man. the bomb used by the US against Nagasaki.
Working under stubborn and unscientific administrators, Soviet scientists struggled steadily. On August 29, 1949, the effort brought results, when the Soviet Union tested the first fission bomb, dubbed "Joe-1" by the US, several years before America's prediction. News of the first Soviet bomb was first announced to the world by the United States, which has detected the nuclear fall it generated from a test site in Kazakhstan.
The loss of American monopoly on nuclear weapons marks the first pull of the nuclear arms race. The response in the US is one of fear, fear and scapegoat, which will ultimately lead to Red-tap tactics from McCarthyism. But the latest information from the unsealed Venona assault and the opening of the KGB archive after the fall of the Soviet Union shows that the Soviet Union had a useful spy who assisted their program, although nothing was identified by McCarthy. However, before this, President Truman announced the decision to start a collision course that would develop weapons much more powerful than those used by the United States against Japan: the hydrogen bomb.
The development of America after World War II
In 1946, Congress established the Civil Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to take over the development of nuclear weapons from the military, and to develop nuclear power. The MEA exploits many private companies in processing uranium and thorium and in other urgent tasks associated with the development of bombs. Many of these companies have very loose security measures and employees are sometimes exposed to radiation levels well above what was allowed at that time or now. In 1974, the Site's Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) of the Army Corps of Engineers was formed to deal with the remaining contaminated sites from these operations.
First thermonuclear weapons
The idea of ​​using fission weapons to trigger a nuclear fusion process can date 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, Edward Teller's participants directed much of the discussion to Enrico Fermi's idea of a "Super" bomb that will use the same reaction that drives the Sun itself.
It is thought that at that time an exterminating weapon would be very easy to develop and which might work on a hydrogen bomb (a thermonuclear weapon) would be possible to complete before the end of the Second World War. However, in reality the problem of ordinary atomic bombs is large enough to keep scientists busy for the next few years, let alone the more speculative "Super" bombs. Only Teller continued to work on the project - contrary to the wishes of Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe project leaders.
After the atomic bombing of Japan, many scientists at Los Alamos rebelled against the idea of ​​creating weapons thousands of times more powerful than the first atomic bomb. For scientists the question is partly technical - weapons design is still quite uncertain and unworkable - and some morals: like weapons, they argue, can only be used against large civilian populations, and thus can only be used as genocide weapons.
Many scientists, like Bethe, insist that the United States not develop such weapons and set an example to the Soviet Union. The arms promoters, including Teller, Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, argue that such developments are inevitable, and deny such protection to the people of the United States - especially when the Soviet Union is likely to create such weapons. - itself an immoral and unwise act.
Oppenheimer, who is now chair of the General Advisory Committee of the successor of the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, is leading a recommendation against the development of the weapon. The reason is partly because the technological success seems limited at the time (and not worth the investment of resources to ascertain if this is true), and because Oppenheimer believes that the atomic power of the United States would be more effective if they consisted of many large fission weapons (some bombs could dropped on the same target) rather than super-heavy and heavy bombs, of which there are relatively limited numbers of targets of sufficient size to warrant such developments.
Moreover, if such weapons were developed by the two super powers, they would be more effective against the United States than against the Soviet Union, because the United States had more areas of industrial and civic activity that were congested as a big weapon target than the Soviet Union.
In the end, President Truman made the final decision, seeking an appropriate response to the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. On January 31, 1950, Truman announced a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb (fusion). At this point, however, the exact mechanism is still unknown: the classic hydrogen bomb, where heat from the fission bomb will be used to turn on the fusion material, looks very unworkable. However, insight by Los Alamos mathematician Stanislaw Ulam indicated that fission bombs and fusion fuels could be in a separate part of the bomb, and that the radiation from the first fission bomb could work in a way to compress fusion material before turning it on.
Teller pushes the idea further, and uses a boosted "George" test result (a fission-driven device using a small amount of fusion fuel to increase the yield of a fission bomb) to confirm the fusion of heavy hydrogen elements before preparing a Teller- Ulam their first real stage. Many scientists, initially opposed to weapons, such as Oppenheimer and Bethe, changed their previous opinion, seeing developments as unstoppable.
The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States at Ivy Operations on November 1, 1952, at Elugelab Island in Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named "Mike." Mike uses liquid deuterium as a fusion fuel and a large fission weapon as a trigger. This device is a prototype design and not a weapon that can be shipped: standing on 20Ã, ft (6 m) tall and weighing at least 140,000  £ (64 t) (its cooling equipment adds  £ 24,000 (11,000 kg) too) can be dropped from even the largest aircraft.
The explosion generated energy equivalent to 10.4 megatons of TNT - more than 450 times the bombing force fell to Nagasaki - and the disappeared Elugelab, leaving the depths of the underwater crater of 1,940 km (1.9 km) and the depth of 164 ft (50 m) where the island used to. Truman initially tried to create a media outage about the test - hoping it would not be a problem in the upcoming presidential election - but on January 7, 1953, Truman announced the development of a hydrogen bomb into the world for clues and speculation had started to appear in the media.
Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union exploded the first thermonuclear device, designed by physicist Andrei Sakharov, on 12 August 1953, labeled "Joe-4" by the West. This raises concerns within the US government and military, because, unlike Mike, Soviet devices are a weapon that can be shipped, which the US does not yet have. This first device, though not exactly a hydrogen bomb, can only achieve explosive results in hundreds of kilotons (never reaching the megaton range of staged weapons). However, this is a powerful propaganda tool for the Soviet Union, and the technical differences are quite objective for American public and politicians.
After Mike's explosion of less than a year, Joe-4 seems to validate the claim that bombs can not be avoided and defend those who have supported the development of fusion programs. Coming during the peak of McCarthyism, the effect was pronounced at a security hearing in early 1954, which revoked the permission of former Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer, arguing that he was unreliable, did not support the American hydrogen bomb program, and had long-standing left-wing ties in the 1930s, an. Edward Teller participated in the trial as the only great scientist to testify against Oppenheimer, resulting in his virtual expulsion from the physics community.
On March 1, 1954, the US detonated its first thermonuclear weapon (which uses the lithium isotope as a fusion fuel), known as the "Shrimp" device of the Castle Bravo test, in Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. This tool produces 15 megatons, more than double the expected results, and became the worst radiological disaster in US history. The combination of unexpected large explosions and adverse weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive nuclear fallout to pollute more than 7,000 square miles (18,000 km 2 ). 239 Marshall Islanders and 28 Americans were exposed to significant amounts of radiation, resulting in increased rates of cancer and birth defects in the coming years.
The crew of the Japanese tuna fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 , who has been fishing outside the exclusion zone, returns to the ports suffering from radiation and skin burns; one crew member was seriously ill. Efforts were made to recover contaminated fish loads but at least two large tuna may be sold and eaten. A total of 75 tons of tuna captured between March and December were found unfit for human consumption. When crew members died and the full results of contamination were announced by the US, Japan's concerns were revived about the dangers of radiation.
The age of the hydrogen bomb has a profound effect on the thought of nuclear war in the minds of the people and the military. With only a fission bomb, nuclear war is something that might be restricted. Lowered by the aircraft and only capable of destroying the most heavily built areas of the big cities, it is possible for many to see fission bombs as technological extensions of large-scale conventional bombing - such as the extensive bombing of German and Japanese cities during the War world II. Proponents are excluded as exaggerated statements that such weapons can cause death or danger throughout the world.
Even in the decades before the fission weapons, there has been speculation about the possibility for humans to end all life on this planet, either by accident or deliberate crime - but technology has not yet provided the capacity for such action. The enormous power of the hydrogen bombs makes world destruction possible.
The Castle Bravo incident itself raised questions about the survival of nuclear war. Government scientists in the United States and the Soviet Union insist that fusion weapons, unlike fission weapons, are cleaner, since fusion reactions do not produce products of harmful radioactive fission reactions. Although technically correct, this hides a more horrific point: the last stage of a multi-stage hydrogen bomb often uses a neutron generated by a fusion reaction to induce fisiasi in a natural uranium jacket, and provides about half of the device's results. self.
This fission stage makes the fusion weapon much dirtier than it should be. This is evident in the looming cloud of deadly fallout that follows the Bravo test. When the Soviet Union tested its first megaton device in 1955, the likelihood of a limited nuclear war appears further in public and political thought. Even non-targeted cities and countries will suffer from poor contamination. A very dangerous fission product will spread through normal weather patterns and is attached to the soil and water around the planet.
Speculation begins to run toward the fall and dust of a full-scale nuclear exchange that will be done into the world as a whole, not just cities and countries directly involved. In this way, the fate of the world is now tied to the fate of super powers that use bombs.
Prevention and brinkmanship
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the US and the Soviet Union both sought, in a tit-for-tat approach, to prevent other forces from obtaining nuclear supremacy. It had enormous political and cultural effects during the Cold War.
The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large specially crafted devices, requiring highly trained personnel to arm and deploy them. They can be dropped only from the largest bomber aircraft - at the time of the B-29 Superfortress - and each plane can only carry one bomb inside its grasp.
The first hydrogen bomb was equally massive and complicated. The ratio of one aircraft to a single bomb is still quite impressive compared to conventional non-nuclear weapons, but against other nuclear-armed countries, it is considered a major danger. In the postwar years, the United States spent a lot of efforts to make the "G.I.-proof" bomb - which can be used and deployed by members of the US Army, rather than Nobel Prize-winning scientists. In the 1950s, the US conducted a nuclear test program to improve nuclear weapons.
Beginning in 1951, the Nevada Test Site (in the Nevada desert) became the prime location for all US nuclear testing (in the Soviet Union, the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan played a similar role). The tests are divided into two main categories: "related weapons" (verify that new weapons work or see how they work) and "weapon effects" (see how weapons behave under various conditions or how the structure behaves when experiencing weapons).
Initially, almost all nuclear tests are atmospheric (done above ground, in the atmosphere) or under water (like some tests conducted in the Marshall Islands). Testing is used as a sign of national strength and technology, but it also raises questions about the safety of the test, which releases nuclear fallout into the atmosphere (most dramatically by the Castle Bravo test in 1954, but in a more limited number with almost all atmospheric nuclear testing).
Because testing is seen as a sign of technological development (the ability to design weapons that can be used without some form of testing is considered dubious), termination testing is often referred to as a stand-in to stop in the nuclear arms race itself, and many stand out. scientists and statesmen lobbied to ban nuclear testing. In 1958, the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom (new nuclear power) declared a temporary testing moratorium for political and health reasons, but in 1961 the Soviet Union had violated the moratorium and the Soviet Union and the US began to test with great frequency.
As a show of political power, the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear weapon ever in October 1961, the massive Tsar Bomba, tested in reduced state with a yield of about 50 megatons - in full condition it is estimated there are already about 100 Mt. The weapons were largely impractical for actual military use, but hot enough to cause third-degree burns at a distance of 62 mi (100 km). Overall, dirty, the design will increase the number of fallout worldwide since 1945 by 25%.
In 1963, all nuclear and many non-nuclear countries signed the Limited Trial Ban Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, under water, or in outer space. The agreement allows underground tests.
Most of the tests are much simpler, and work for the direct technical purpose as well as the potential of their political nuances. Repair weapons take two main forms. One is the improvement of efficiency and strength, and in just a few years developed fission bombs were many times more powerful than those made during World War II. The other is the miniaturization program, reducing the size of nuclear weapons.
The smaller bombs meant that bombers could carry more of them, and also that they could be brought to a new generation of rockets under construction in the 1950s and 1960s. The science of US rockets got a huge boost in the postwar years, mostly with the help of engineers obtained from the Nazi rocket program. These include scientists such as Wernher von Braun, who helped design the Nazi-launched V-2 rocket in the English Channel. The American program, Project Paperclip, has sought to move German scientists into American hands (and away from Soviet hands) and put them to work in the US.
Weapon increase
Early nuclear-ended rockets - such as Honest Honest MGR-1, first powered by the US in 1953 - are surface-to-surface missiles with a relatively short range (about 15 km/25 km maximum) and generate about twice as much the size of the first fission weapon. Limited reach means they can only be used in certain types of military situations. US rockets can not, for example, threaten Moscow with direct attacks, and can only be used as tactical weapons (that is, for small-scale military situations).
Strategic weapons - weapons that can threaten the whole country - are relied upon, for now, on long-range bombers that can penetrate deep into enemy territory. In the US, this requirement led, in 1946, to create a Strategic Air Command - a bomber system led by General Curtis LeMay (who previously led the Japanese bombing during World War II). In operations such as Chrome Dome, SAC continues nuclear armed aircraft in the air 24 hours a day, ready for orders to attack Moscow.
The possibility of this technology allows the nuclear strategy to develop a logic that is much different from previous military thought. Because the threat of nuclear war is so horrible, it was first thought that it might make future war impossible. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's doctrine of "massive retaliation" in the early years of the Cold War was a message to the Soviet Union, saying that if the Reds tried to attack parts of Europe that were not given to the Eastern bloc during the Potsdam Conference (such as West Germany ), nuclear weapons will be used against Soviet troops and potentially Soviet leaders.
With the development of faster-response technologies (such as rockets and long-range bombs), this policy is beginning to shift. If the Soviet Union also has nuclear weapons and a policy of "massive retaliation" is done, it is reasonable, then any Soviet troops are not killed in the initial attack, or launched when the attack is in progress, will be able to serve on their own. form of nuclear revenge against the US Recognizing that this is an undesirable outcome, military officers and game theorists at the RAND think tank developed a nuclear war strategy that was eventually called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
MAD divides the potential of nuclear war into two stages: first attack and second attack . The first attack means the first use of nuclear weapons by a nuclear-equipped country against another nuclear-equipped country. If the attacking state does not prevent the attacked country from nuclear response, the attacked state will respond with a second attack against the attacking state. In this situation, did the US first attack the Soviet Union or the Soviet Union first attack the United States, the end result being that both countries would be damaged to total destruction.
According to game theory, because starting a nuclear war is suicide, no logical country will shoot first. However, if a country can launch the first attack that completely destroys the ability of the target country to respond, it may give confidence in the country to start a nuclear war. The purpose of a country operating by the MAD doctrine is to reject the country versus the ability of this first attack.
MAD plays in two seemingly contradictory modes of thought: cold logic and emotional fear. The English phrase MAD is often known as, "nuclear deterrence," translated by France as "insubordination," and "terrorized" by the Soviets. The real paradox of nuclear war is summed up by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as "things get worse, the better they are" - the greater the threat of collective destruction, the safer the world.
This philosophy makes a number of technological and political demands on participating countries. For one thing, it is said that it should always be assumed that the enemy state might try to gain first attack ability, which should always be avoided. In American politics, this translates into a demand to avoid the "gap bomber" and "missile slit" in which the Soviet Union potentially beat America. It also encourages the production of thousands of nuclear weapons by both the US and the Soviet Union, much more than is necessary to destroy the main civil and military infrastructure of opposing countries. These policies and strategies are filmed in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets, were unable to keep up with the first US strike ability, instead planning the MAD by building the Doomsday Machine, and thus, after (literally) angry US General ordered nuclear strikes into the Soviet Union, the end of the world took place.
The policy also encourages the development of the first early warning system. Conventional wars, even in the fastest time, have been fought for several days and weeks. With long-distance bombers, from the start of a nuclear attack to its conclusion only a few hours. The rocket can reduce the conflict to minutes. Planners argue that conventional command and control systems can not adequately react to nuclear strikes, so it takes a long time to develop computer systems that can search for enemy attacks and rapid response.
The United States poured massive funds into the development of SAGE, a system that can track and intercept enemy bombers using information from remote radar stations. This is the first computer system featuring real-time processing, multiplexing, and display devices. It was the first general computing machine, and the direct predecessor of modern computers.
The emergence of anti-nuclear movement
The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II quickly followed the 1945 Trinity nuclear test, and the Little Boy device was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The explosion with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT, explosions and heat wave bombs destroyed almost 50,000 buildings and killed about 75,000 people. Furthermore, the inventory of world nuclear weapons increases.
Operation Crossroads was a series of nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States in Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1946. The goal was to test the effects of nuclear weapons on naval vessels. To prepare Bikini atolls for nuclear testing, Bikini indigenous people were expelled from their homes and settled on smaller and uninhabited islands where they could not defend themselves.
National leaders debate the impact of nuclear weapons on domestic and foreign policy. Also involved in the nuclear weapons policy debate is the scientific community, through professional associations such as the Federation of Atomic Sciences and the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs. The radioactive fallout of the first nuclear weapons test attracted public attention in 1954 when the Hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific polluted the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon. One of the fishermen died in Japan seven months later. This incident caused widespread concern worldwide and "provided a decisive impetus for the emergence of anti-nuclear weapons movements in many countries". The movement of anti-nuclear weapons is growing rapidly because for many people the atomic bomb "wraps the worst direction in which society moves".
The peace movement emerged in Japan and in 1954 they gathered to form "Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Attack". Japan's opposition to the Pacific nuclear weapons test is widespread, and "some 35 million signatures are collected on petitions calling for a ban on nuclear weapons". The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was published in London on 9 July 1955 by Bertrand Russell in the midst of the Cold War. It highlights the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and calls on world leaders to seek a peaceful resolution to international conflict. The signatories included eleven distinguished intellectuals and scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed it just days before his death on April 18, 1955. A few days after its release, philanthropist Cyrus S. Eaton offered to sponsor the conference - calling in the manifesto - in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, the birthplace of Eaton. The conference was the first of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, held in July 1957.
In Britain, the first March Aldermaston organized by the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign took place at Easter 1958, when several thousand people marched for four days from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Discovery Discovery Center close to Aldermaston in Berkshire, England, to show their opposition to nuclear weapons. The Aldermaston march continued until the late 1960s when tens of thousands of people took part in the four-day parade.
In 1959, a letter in the Atomic Science Bulletin was the beginning of a successful campaign to stop the Atomic Energy Commission from dumping radioactive waste at sea 19 kilometers from Boston. On November 1, 1961, at the height of the Cold War, some 50,000 women united by Strike Women for Peace marched in 60 cities across the United States to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. It was the largest national women's peace protest in the 20th century.
In 1958, Linus Pauling and his wife presented the UN with a petition signed by more than 11,000 scientists who called for an end to nuclear weapons trials. The "Baby Tooth Survey," led by Dr. Louise Reiss, demonstrated convincingly in 1961 that ground-level nuclear testing poses a significant public health risk in the form of radioactive degradation primarily through milk from cows that have ingested the contaminated grass. Public pressure and research results later led to a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons on the ground, followed by the Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963 by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.
Cuban Missile Crisis
Bombs and short-range rockets are unreliable: aircraft can be shot down, and previous nuclear missiles can only cover limited reach - for example, the first Soviet rocket range limits them to targets in Europe. However, in the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could be launched from very remote areas far from their targets. They have also developed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which have fewer reaches but can be launched from submarines that are very close to the target without radar warning. This makes any national protection of nuclear missiles increasingly impractical.
Military reality is made for dangerous diplomatic situations. The international politics of brinkmanship make leaders call for their willingness to participate in nuclear war rather than acknowledge any advantage for their opponents, giving the impression of public fear that their generation may be the last. The civil defense programs carried out by the two superpowers, exemplified by the construction of shelters and urging civilians about the survival of nuclear war, did little to alleviate 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 built on the island of Cuba, just off the coast of the southern United States, beginning what became known as the Crisis Cuban Missiles. US government John F. Kennedy concluded that the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev, plans to place a Soviet nuclear missile on the island, which is under the control of communist Fidel Castro. On October 22, Kennedy announced the findings on television. He announced a sea blockade around Cuba that would restore Soviet nuclear shipments, and warned that the military was ready "for all possibilities." The missile has a distance of 2,400 miles (4,000 km), and will allow the Soviet Union to quickly destroy many major American cities on the East Coast if nuclear war starts.
The leaders of the two superpowers stood from the nose to the nose, apparently ready for the beginning of the third world war. Khrushchev's ambition to place arms on the island was partially motivated by the fact that the United States had placed similar weapons in Britain, Italy and Turkey nearby, and had previously tried to sponsor the previous year's Cuban invasion of the failed Gulf Bay. Pig Invasion. On October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy offering to withdraw all missiles if Kennedy was committed to the policy of no Cuban invasion into the future. Khrushchev says the threat of convincing damage is eloquent:
"You and I should not be pulling the end of the rope where you have tied the knot of the war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become.And one day it can come when this knot is tied so If the bound person is no longer able let go of it, and then the knot should be cut What does it mean that I do not have to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly the frightening power of our two countries. "
However, a day later, the Soviets sent another message, this time demanding that the US remove its missiles from Turkey before the missiles were withdrawn from Cuba. On the same day, the U-2 aircraft was shot down over Cuba and another was almost intercepted over the Soviet Union, when Soviet ships approached the quarantine zone. Kennedy responded by accepting the first deal publicly, and sending his brother Robert to the Soviet embassy to accept the second agreement in person. On October 28, Soviet ships stopped at the quarantine line and, after some hesitation, turned toward the Soviet Union. Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the removal of all missiles in Cuba, and the US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was moved to comment, "We became eyeballs, and others just blinked."
The crisis was then seen as the closest of the US and Soviet Union to ever come to nuclear war and was blocked by a last-minute compromise by the two superpowers. Worries about communication difficulties led to the first hotline installment, a direct link between superpowers that allowed them to more easily discuss future military activity and political maneuvers. It has been made clear that missiles, bombers, submarines, and computerized combustion systems increase any situation into Armageddon much more easily than anyone wants.
After stepping so close to the brink, both the US and the Soviet Union are working to reduce their nuclear tensions in the following years immediately. The fastest peak of this work was the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, in which the US and the Soviet Union agreed to no longer test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, under water, or in outer space. Underground testing continues, allowing for further weapon development, but the risk of worldwide downfall is deliberately reduced, and the era of using massive nuclear tests as a form of rattling sabers is over.
In December 1979, NATO decided to deploy cruise missiles and Pershing II in Western Europe in response to the spread of Soviet medium-range missiles, and in the early 1980s, "dangerous Soviet-US nuclear confrontation" emerged. In New York on June 12, 1982, a million people gathered to protest nuclear weapons, and to support the second UN Special Session on Disarmament. As the nuclear abolitionist movement grows, there are many protests on the Nevada Test Site. For example, on February 6, 1987, nearly 2,000 demonstrators, including six members of Congress, protested testing of nuclear weapons and more than 400 people were arrested. Four of the major groups hosting this renewal of anti-nuclear activism are Greenpeace, The American Peace Test, The Western Shoshone and the Nevada Desert Experience.
There are at least four major false alarms, most recently in 1995, which resulted in the activation of an early warning protocol of a nuclear attack. They include the unintentional loading of training footage to an American early warning computer; a computer chip failure that appears to indicate a random number of attacking missiles; the rare alignment of the Sun, the US missile fields, and the Soviet early warning satellite which caused it to confuse clouds of altitude with the launch of missiles; the launch of a Norwegian research rocket resulted in President Yeltsin turning on his nuclear bag for the first time.
Initial proliferation
In the fifties and sixties, three more countries joined the "nuclear club." The United Kingdom has become an integral part of the Manhattan Project after the Quebec Treaty in 1943. The passage of the United States McMahon Act in 1946 unilaterally broke this partnership and prevented further passage of information to Britain. The British government, under Clement Attlee, determined that a British bomb was essential. Due to British involvement in the Manhattan Project, the UK has extensive knowledge in some areas, but not elsewhere.
An improved version of the 'Fat Man' was developed, and on February 26, 1952, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that the British Empire also had an atomic bomb and a successful test took place on October 3, 1952. At first the bombs fell freely. , intended for use by V Force of jet bombers. A Vickant Valiant dropped his first British nuclear weapons on October 11, 1956 in Maralinga, South Australia. Then came a missile, Blue Steel, intended to be ridden by a V Force bomber, and then a medium-range Blue Streak ballistic missile (later canceled). The Anglo-American cooperation on nuclear weapons was restored by the US-British Mutual Defense Treaty of 1958. As a result of this and the Polaris Sales Agreement, the United Kingdom has purchased US designs for undersea missiles and installing its own warheads. It retains complete independent control over the use of missiles. He no longer has a free falling bomb.
France has been heavily involved in nuclear research before World War II through the work of Joliot-Curies. It was stopped after the war because of the instability of the Fourth Republic and the lack of finance. However, in the 1950s, France launched a civilian nuclear research program, which produced plutonium as a by-product.
In 1956, France established a secret Committee for Atomic Energy Military Applications and a development program for delivery vehicles. With the return of Charles de Gaulle to the presidency of France in 1958, the final decision to make a bomb was made, which resulted in a successful test in 1960. Since then, France has developed and maintained its own independent nuclear deterrent from NATO.
In 1951, China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement whereby China supplied uranium ore instead of technical assistance in producing nuclear weapons. In 1953, China established a research program under the guise of civilian nuclear energy. Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union provided equipment in large numbers. But because the relationship between the two countries exacerbated the Soviets reduced the amount of aid and, in 1959, refused to donate the bomb for the purpose of copying. Nonetheless, China made rapid progress and tested the atomic bomb on October 16, 1964, at Lop Nur. They tested a nuclear missile on October 25, 1966, and a hydrogen bomb on June 14, 1967.
China's nuclear warheads were produced from 1968 and thermonuclear warheads from 1974. It is also considered that the Chinese warhead has been successfully diminished from 2200 kg to 700 kg through the use of designs obtained by espionage from the United States. The current number of warheads is unknown, but by 2017 is expected to be in the low hundreds. China is the only nuclear weapons state that guarantees the use of non-nuclear weapons first.
Cold War
After World War II, the balance of power between the Eastern and Western blocs and the fear of global destruction prevented further military use of the atomic bomb. This fear is even a central part of the Cold War strategy, which is called the doctrine of Certain Destruction. Once the importance of this balance to the international stability of the treaty-making covenant, the Missile Anti-Ballistic Agreement (or ABM agreement), signed by the US and Soviet Union in 1972 to limit the development of defense against nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles carrying them. This doctrine resulted in a large increase in the number of nuclear weapons, as each side tried to ensure it had the weapon to destroy the opposition in all possible scenarios.
Initial delivery systems for nuclear devices are mainly bombers such as the United States B-29 Superfortress and Convair B-36, and then B-52 Stratofortress. The ballistic missile system, based on the design of Wernher von Braun World War II (especially the V-2 rocket), was developed by the United States and the Soviet team (in the case of the US, efforts were directed by German scientists and engineers though the Soviet Union also made use of scientists, engineers, and technical data of Germany are caught widely).
This system is used to launch satellites, such as Sputnik, and to encourage Space Race, but they are mainly developed to create intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) that can deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The development of this system continued throughout the Cold War - although the plans and agreements, beginning with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), restricted the spread of this system until, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the development of the system was essentially stalled, and many weapons were shut down and destroyed. On January 27, 1967, more than 60 countries signed the Space Treaty, banning nuclear weapons in space.
There are a number of potential nuclear disasters. After the air crash, US nuclear weapons had disappeared near Atlantic City, New Jersey (1957); Savannah, Georgia (1958) (see Tybee Bomb); Goldsboro, North Carolina (1961); offshore 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). Most of the lost weapons were found, Spanish devices after three months of efforts by DSV Alvin and DSV Aluminaut.
The Soviet Union was less open about such incidents, but environmental group Greenpeace believes that there are about forty non-US nuclear devices that have been lost and have not recovered, compared to the eleven lost by Americans, mostly in submarine disasters. The United States has been trying to recover Soviet devices, especially in the 1974 Azorian Project which uses a special Hughes Glomar Explorer rescue boat to raise a Soviet submarine. After the leaked news about the boondoggle, the CIA will make a favorite phrase coin for refusing to disclose sensitive information, called glomarization: We can not confirm or deny the existence of the requested information but, hypothetically, if the data exists, the subject matter will classified, and can not be disclosed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 basically ended the Cold War. However, the end of the Cold War failed to end the threat of use of nuclear weapons, although global concerns about nuclear war were reduced substantially. In a major movement of symbolic escalation, Boris Yeltsin, on 26 January 1992, announced that Russia plans to stop targeting US cities with nuclear weapons.
Cost
The design, testing, production, deployment, and defense of nuclear weapons is one of the biggest expenditures for countries with nuclear weapons. In the United States during the Cold War years, between "a quarter to a third of all military spending since World War II [devoted to nuclear weapons and their infrastructure." According to a retrospective study of the Brookings Institution published in 1998 by the Nuclear Weapon Cost Study Committee (formed in 1993 by W. Alton Jones Foundation), total spending on US nuclear weapons from 1940 to 1998 was $ 5.5 trillion in the 1996 Dollar.
In comparison, the total public debt at the end of the fiscal year 1998 was $ 5,478,189,000,000 in 1998 Dollars or $ 5.3 trillion in the 1996 Dollar. The overall public debt in 1998 was therefore equal to the cost of research , development and deployment of US nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons related programs during the Cold War.
Second nuclear age
The second nuclear age can be regarded as the proliferation of nuclear weapons among the lower forces and for reasons other than the American-Soviet-Chinese rivalry.
India started relatively early on a program aimed at nuclear weapons capability, but apparently accelerated this after the 1962 Indian-Indian War. The first Indian-test atomic explosion was in 1974 with the Smiling Buddha, described as " A peaceful nuclear explosion. "
After the collapse of the Eastern Military High Command and the disintegration of Pakistan as a result of the 1971 Winter war, Bhutto Pakistan launched a scientific research on nuclear weapons. The Indian test led to Pakistan spurring its program, and the ISI conducted a successful espionage operation in the Netherlands, while also developing the program locally. India tested its fission and perhaps a fusion device in 1998, and Pakistan successfully tested fission devices that same year, raising fears that they would use nuclear weapons with each other.
All former Soviet bloc countries with nuclear weapons (Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan) returned their warheads to Russia in 1996.
South Africa also has an active program to develop uranium-based nuclear weapons, but dismantled its nuclear weapons program in the 1990s. Experts do not believe it actually tests such weapons, although later claimed that they were building some crude devices that were eventually dismantled. In the late 1970s, American spy satellites detected "brief, intense, short flashes of light near the southern tip of Africa." Known as the Vela Incident, he speculates it has been a test of a South African or possibly Israeli nuclear weapon, although some people feel that it may be caused by natural events or detector damage.
Israel is widely believed to have warehouses up to several hundred nuclear warheads, but this has never been officially confirmed or rejected (although the existence of their Dimona nuclear facility is confirmed
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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