Nuclear Testing 1950s

The Race for Arms

The idea of a weapon that could produce global annihilation was born during the Second World War; with this information in tow, the United States and the Soviet Union entered into the nuclear arms race, developing the first atomic bombs. In order to perfect these weapons of mass destruction, both countries needed to test their products to look for flaws in the general blue prints of the weapons. Seeing the success with the atomic bomb, the United States started developing a more destructive bomb, the hydrogen bomb, believed to be 1000 times stronger than the atomic bomb. In January of 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced the United States’ intention to build a hydrogen bomb because of the fear that the Soviet Union’s advancements in nuclear weapons were a possible threat to the United States and the rest of the world.

It was not until July 13, 1942, during World War II, that the United States began the Manhattan Project to begin developing an atomic bomb. By December 2, a Manhattan Project team, lead by physicist Enrico Fermi, produced the first artificial fission reaction at the University of Chicago. Even after World War II ended and President Roosevelt died, the research for developing an atomic bomb continued. Three years later, the Manhattan Project achieved it’s goal of developing a true atomic weapon. The so-called nuclear arms race in between the United States and the Soviet Union was a competition for supremacy in nuclear weapons during the Cold War. During the Cold War, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries also developed nuclear weapons, though none engaged in warhead production on the same size as the two superpowers.

The first nuclear test took place in New Mexico on July 16, 1945 under the supervision of Robert J. Oppenheimer. This test was intended to prove the actuality of a radical implosion weapon design that had been developed at Los Alamos during the previous year. This design, embodied in the test device called Gadget, involved a new technology that could not be adequately evaluated without a full-scale test. Less than a month later, the United States dropped two nuclear weapons of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. When President Truman heard word of the successful bombing in Hiroshima he exclaimed, “This is the greatest day in history!” The United States conducted six nuclear tests before the Soviet Union developed their first atomic bomb.