Nuclear Arms Race

ByTyler Kern

Alex PudansAlex Thompson

Main Points in the Nuclear Arms Race

• The United States perceived their main enemy to be the Soviet Union, they needed missiles that could travel long distances. Therefore, after the war, the United States concentrated on developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

• The Cold War policy was based on bringing an end to the development and accumulation of nuclear weapons both in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Main Points Cont.

• In the years immediately after the Second World War, the United States had a nuclear monopoly on both specific knowledge and, most importantly, raw materials.

• While American thinkers had predicted that the USSR would not have nuclear weapons until the mid-1950s, the first Soviet bomb was detonated on August 29 of 1949, shocking the entire world.

Other Stuff

Governments devoted massive amounts of resources to increasing the quality and quantity of their nuclear arsenal. Both nations quickly began work on hydrogen bombs and the United States detonated the first such device on November 1, 1952. Again the Soviets surprised the Americans by exploding a deployable thermonuclear device of their own the next August, though it was not actually a "true" multi-stage hydrogen bomb (that would wait until 1955). The Soviet H-bomb was almost completely a product of domestic research, as their espionage sources in the USA had only worked on very preliminary (and incorrect) versions of the hydrogen bomb.