Introduction

“You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon . . .  It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. “

--Harry S Truman, when asked to authorize the possible use of atomic bombs during the Berlin Airlift crisis in 1948

In October 1962, the Soviet Union, under Nikita Kruschev, attempted to secretly place intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from American shores.  In response, the United States imposed a naval blockade on the island, and threatened an invasion.  Both sides increased their nuclear alert levels, and the world came as close as it ever did to full-scale nuclear war.  Unknown to the Americans, the Russians had already placed a number of tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba – had the United States carried out its threatened invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would have been inevitable.

At the height of the Cold War, in the mid 1980’s, the Soviet Union and the United States had some 70,000 nuclear weapons pointed at each other, an arsenal of explosive power sufficient to kill everyone on earth several times over.  The city of Hiroshima had been  completely destroyed in 1945 by a single bomb with an output of 15 kilotons (15,000 tons of TNT).  Modern thermonuclear weapons, however, have explosive yields generally from 100 kilotons (100,000 tons of TNT) to 15 mega-tons (15 million tons of TNT).  In modern terms, the Hiroshima bomb was merely a small tactical weapon.  Modern weapons are up to one thousand times more powerful.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War was over, and the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons seemingly had no further purpose.  By 2007, international agreement had reduced both the US and Russian nuclear arsenal to a maximum of 2,000 deployed weapons (but did not limit the number of weapons that could be placed in indefinite storage).

The risk of nuclear warfare, however, is now no longer limited to a Cold War exchange between the nuclear superpowers.  Both India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars with each other, are now nuclear powers.  In May 1998, both India and Pakistan carried out a number of nuclear test explosions within days of each other. 

In October 2006, North Korea, which invaded South Korea in 1950 and still maintains a war footing towards its southern neighbor, tested a nuclear device.

In the volatile Middle East, which has seen 60 years of unceasing warfare, Israel is believed to possess a nuclear arsenal of at least 200 weapons.  Iraq is known to have carried out research into nuclear weapons.  Iran is in the process of producing highly enriched uranium (HEU), and seems to have the goal of producing nuclear weapons in the near future. 

France, China, and the United Kingdom all maintain stockpiles of nuclear weapons.  During the 1970’s, the apartheid regime in South Africa built a small number of nuclear weapons.  By 1991, as apartheid was collapsing, all of the weapons and all of the production facilities and plans were destroyed.  Although its motives were less than altruistic (the racist apartheid regime simply didn’t want a Black-controlled government to have either nuclear weapons or the knowledge of how to make them), South Africa remains the only nation that has carried out complete unilateral nuclear disarmament.

In the United States, the George W Bush administration laid out plans to develop a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons, which were primarily intended to be used in the “war on terror”, against non-nuclear nations that posed a threat of nuclear proliferation.  The administration claimed the unilateral right, without international authority, to carry out low-level nuclear strikes against any facilities that might be used to produce weapons of mass destruction.

This policy is in direct conflict with potential nuclear weapons programs in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.  As a result, the chances of a nuclear military conflict are higher now than they have been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  The famous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was moved back to 17 minutes before midnight after the US and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991 (the furthest away from Doomsday the clock has ever been). Since then, however, with the nuclear saber-rattling by Pakistan and India, the North Korean nuclear test, the unilateral US rejection of several arms control agreements and its efforts to make new weapons, and the growing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, the clock has moved to five minutes before midnight – the highest level of threat since the height of the Cold War.

What follows is a history of nuclear weapons, from the Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb that was used on Japan, to the “Mike” test device which led the way for production of thermonuclear “hydrogen bombs” with a thousand times the explosive yield, to the “war on terror” which seeks to build a new generation of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons.  For the most part, the reports included here are official government histories. The Smyth Report was prepared to explain to Congress exactly what was done with the $2 billion that the Manhattan Project spent during its quest for the bomb.  The Franck Report was prepared by a group of Manhattan Project scientists who were opposed to dropping the bomb.  “The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” is the official report of the Manhattan Project delegations that traveled to Japan to observe the effects of the two nuclear weapons. The General Advisory Committee was asked by the Atomic Energy Commission to prepare a report on whether the US should carry out a crash program to produce a hydrogen bomb. “Theoretical Work at Los Alamos on Thermonuclear Weapons” was prepared by the head of the Theoretical Division as part of a planned larger official history that was never completed.  “Nuclear Strategy in the New World Order” lays out the argument for the unilateral first-use of nuclear weapons by the United States in the “war on terror”.

A few of the reports here are unofficial personal recollections written by participants.  Hans Bethe wrote his “Comments on the History of the H-Bomb” (originally published in Los Alamos Science, the house magazine of the Los Alamos Laboratory) in part as a response to efforts to depict Robert Oppenheimer (the project director for both the Manhattan Project and the H-Bomb effort) as a communist sympathizer who deliberately delayed the US nuclear weapons program.  (Oppenheimer was removed from the project and his security clearance was revoked.) 

“Weapon Design:  We’ve Done a Lot, But We Can’t Say Much” was written by several H-bomb researchers and published in Los Alamos Science.

Nuclear weapons have always been, from the beginning, weapons of mass terror.  It is my hope that by remembering the history of these weapons, of the Cold War arms race that they provoked, and the terrible destructive power that these weapons have already unleashed, we can, as a world, re-dedicate ourselves to the task of completely eliminating all nuclear weapons from the planet.

Lenny Flank

St Petersburg, Florida

2007