Nuclear Weapons

In mid-2017, President Donald Trump let Kim Jong-un know that if his threats continued they would be met with “fire and fury the likes the world has never seen”. The scorching tweet went viral immediately. In response, the North Korean leader detonated a 100-kiloton hydrogen bomb, a successful test of a nuclear device which would be mounted on future missiles.

The Cold War between the United States of America and the Soviet Union lasted for more than 40 years. In general, this was a war of spies and subterfuge, of covert action and espionage. There was always a danger, however, that an error of judgment on either side could suddenly cause the Cold War to turn red-hot with an exchange of nuclear weapons. On many occasions, tensions between the countries increased, but the prospect of all-out nuclear war between America and Russia was never closer than during a two-week period in October of 1962.

After a devastating run of German victories, Allied troops are beginning to halt Hitler’s advance. But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling. Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world’s first nuclear weapon. For the Allies’ top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler’s chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years.

President Eisenhower led us to victory in World War II. He then led our country as President for 8 years. He understood war and he understood how Washington worked. The major message he gave us as he left the presidency was: Beware of the Military Industrial Complex. His warning was very appropriate but it was not heeded by our nation. I know because I not only witnessed it being ignored, but I participated in using the power of the Military Industrial Complex during my aerospace career. Reagan's Star Wars describes why and how the power of the Military Industrial Complex gave birth to the Strategic Defense Initiative known as Star Wars.

Tens of millions died during World War II as the warring powers raced to create the best fighter planes, tanks, and guns, and eventually that race extended to bombs which carried enough power to destroy civilization itself. While the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, a dream team was working on the Manhattan Project in America, a program kept so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he took the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945. During this time, J. Robert Oppenheimer emerged as an extraordinary scientific mind in the United States.

How did America choose the targets for the atomic bomb? What made Hiroshima preferable over Kyoto or Tokyo? Critical to the mission to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a series of meetings set up in mid-1945 and comprising America’s most powerful military, political and scientific chiefs. The committeemen would decide where and how the first nuclear weapons would be used in anger.

Les bombardements de Hiroshima et Nagasaki, qui ont eu lieu à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, consistent en deux attaques des États-Unis sur deux villes du Japon. C'est la première fois dans l'histoire qu'est utilisée la bombe atomique. Les États-Unis avaient demandé au Japon de capituler en juillet 1945, mais le Japon avait refusé. La menace de l'utilisation de la bombe atomique s'était alors installée. Les Américains craignent que l'attaque au sol du Japon par les troupes américaines puisse provoquer la mort d'un million de soldats américains.