Nuclear warfare

Nuclear war, or atomic war, is war in which nuclear weapons are used.

In general, the discussion can be divided into two subgroups. The first, a limited nuclear war (sometimes attack or exchange), consists of only the use of a small number of weapons in a tactical exchange aimed primarily at the opposing military forces. The second, a full-scale nuclear war, consists of large numbers of weapons used in an attack aimed at an entire country, including both military and civilian targets. Soon after the first use of atomic weapons, the Doomsday Clock was created by the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a symbolic countdown to full-scale nuclear war. A nuclear war, unlike a conventional war, causes widespread destruction at a large scale and has long-term globally damaging effects. It has been proposed that a full-scale nuclear war could bring about the extinction of the human race and permanent damage to most complex life on the planet, ecosystems as well as the severe disruption of the global climate. Thus the reference to nuclear war as a doomsday scenario.

Hiroshima to Semipalatinsk

The United States is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons offensively, having used two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. For more information, see Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For several years after World War II, the US developed and maintained a strategic force based on the Convair B-36 bomber that would be able to attack any potential aggressor from bomber bases in the US. The possibility of an actual nuclear attack on the US was considered somewhat remote because of the nuclear disparity between itself and other nations. Instead, many strategists were fearful that a rogue general would launch an unauthorized attack on the Soviet Union as suggested in the novels Fail-Safe and Red Alert. To assuage this fear, the US placed its nuclear weapons under the control of a new, separate agency named The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In the event of a war, the Strategic Air Command (or SAC) bombers would be moved to AEC bases to be loaded with bombs in a process that would likely have taken several days.

Over a period of a few years, many in the US defense community became increasingly convinced of the invincibility of the United States to a nuclear attack. Indeed, it became generally believed that the threat of nuclear war would deter any strike against the United States. Simultaneously, there was some discussion about placing the AEC's arsenal under international control or placing limits on its development.

On August 29, 1949 the USSR tested its first nuclear weapon at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan (see also Soviet atomic bomb project). Scientists in the United States from the Manhattan Project had warned that in time, the Soviet Union would certainly develop nuclear capabilities of its own. Nevertheless, the effect upon military thinking and planning in the US was dramatic, primarily due to the fact that American military strategists had not anticipated the Soviets would 'catch up' this soon. However, at this time, they had not discovered that the Russians had conducted significant espionage of the project from spies at Los Alamos, the most significant of which were Theodore Hall and Klaus Fuchs. The first Soviet bomb was more or less a deliberate copy of the Fat Man device.

With the monopoly over nuclear technology broken, world-wide nuclear proliferation accelerated. The United Kingdom tested its first atomic bomb in 1952, followed by France in 1960. While much smaller than the arsenals of the USA and the USSR, Western Europe's nuclear reserves were nevertheless a significant factor in strategic planning during the Cold War. A top-secret white paper produced for the British Government in 1959, compiled by the Royal Air Force, estimated that British atomic bombers were capable of destroying key cities and military targets in the Soviet Union, with an estimated 16 million deaths in the USSR (half of whom were estimated to be killed on impact and the rest fatally injured) before bomber aircraft from the United States' Strategic Air Command reached their targets. Throughout the Cold War, the European Community relied heavily on French nuclear forces to defend Western Europe in the event of a ground invasion by Soviet forces. A crucial difference between American and Western European policy, though, was that European states were far more reluctant to deploy their nuclear forces in the event of war. In Britain, government policy throughout the Cold War was dictated by the maxim "Better Red than Dead"[citation needed]; that an invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union was preferable to nuclear annihilation. Even though the United Kingdom and France each possessed several hundred thermonuclear bombs by the mid 1960s, and despite the fact that conventional European armies would be swamped by Soviet tank forces, and despite the popular assumption that the USSR would fire nuclear missiles at London and Paris the moment that war was declared, public opinion and government policy determined that in the event of war with the USSR, nuclear devices were only to be used as the ultimate last resort, and that a surrender to the USSR was far preferable to full-scale nuclear war in Europe.

Go to page 2/2

• The 1950s
• The 1960s
• The 1970s
• The 1980s
• The 2000s