Nuclear Weapons

Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which convert the energy created by a nuclear chain reaction into an explosion of tremendous force. There are two classes of nuclear weapons: atomic weapons and thermonuclear weapons. Atomic weapons derive energy from fission, the splitting of the nucleus of an atom. Thermonuclear weapons generate energy through fusion, the combining of several atomic nuclei into a single massive nucleus. Both forms of nuclear reaction produce enormous amounts of energy, but fusion creates significantly more than fission. Most of the nuclear weapons in existence today are thermonuclear devices.

Nuclear weapons became central to the Cold War as the two major contenders in the conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union, amassed enormous stockpiles, well exceeding the amount needed to [Page 540]destroy one another. The nuclear arms race was underpinned by the notion of mutually assured destruction (MAD), requiring the maintenance of a state of affairs in which the prospect of launching a nuclear offensive would always be deterred by the likelihood of a devastating counterstrike. An oft-cited contributing cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the inability to afford competition with the United States in building and maintaining a large nuclear arsenal.

The development of nuclear weapons required extensive testing and also resulted in a large number of accidents because of radioactive contamination. The problem of nuclear proliferation (i.e., the development of nuclear weapons by nations other than the United States, the Soviet Union (Russia), Great Britain, and China) was recognized even during the Cold War. Because they are so powerful, the development of nuclear weapons by countries previously not possessing them consistently provokes controversy in the international community. In recent years, concern has shifted to the possibility of a nuclear attack by terrorists.

Development of Nuclear Weapons

The potential power of the atom was understood before the outbreak of World War II, a conflict ultimately ended by nuclear weapons. Developments in theoretical physics during the early 20th century laid the foundations of knowledge for nuclear weapons. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, in which he showed that mass and energy are basically the same thing and that mass can be turned into energy. Einstein and other physicists realized that if enough mass could be turned into energy at once, the power generated by the reaction would be tremendous. This raised the happy possibility of creating a nearly perpetual source of energy, but also the dark shadow of a terrible source of destructive power.

The Manhattan Project

In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman were the first scientists to split an atom successfully. The following year, the publication of the process of nuclear fission by Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch made the development of atomic weapons seem increasingly feasible. Chillingly, both of these advances occurred in Nazi Germany, a totalitarian country seemingly bent on dominating Europe by force.

In 1939, Einstein and several colleagues wrote a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, alerting him to the dangerous possibilities resulting from recent discoveries in nuclear physics. Roosevelt decided that it was imperative for the United States and Great Britain to develop nuclear weapons before the Germans did. That year, the U.S. government initiated the Manhattan Project to research the creation and construction of a nuclear weapon. Research was directed by Robert J. Oppenheimer, an eccentric genius who received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard University at the age of 22.

...