Nuclear arms race and the Cold War
Nuclear bombs helped end World War II, but they also played a role in setting the stage for the Cold War that followed
It has been 78 years since the atomic bombings of Japan. Despite the film 'Oppenheimer' trying to humanise the atrocity and its making, we should remember that deploying the bomb was not necessary to win the war.
US policymakers were aware of this fact, yet they pressed on, thereby authoring the atrocity that launched the nuclear age. And it was done solely to show dominance over the Red Terror of the Soviet Union.
After the fall of Berlin, the Soviet Union had taken control of large parts of Eastern Europe. Then, the Red Army was advancing towards Japan. And the US feared that if the Red Army made Imperial Japan surrender, the US would lose all foothold in the Near East.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
So, the US dropped the bombs without informing the Soviets, who had already agreed to fight Japan. This raised suspicion in the Soviet Union that the US was trying to intimidate them with this new devastating weapon.
The Soviets knew about the Manhattan Project thanks to their atomic spy ring. But, until US President Harry S Truman received word that the scientists of the Manhattan Project had successfully detonated the world's first nuclear device in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert and said to the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that the US had "a new weapon of unusual destructive force", Stalin did not give it much thought.
Stalin immediately went to his subordinates and said, "We need to get Kurchatov working faster on this." Igor Kurchatov was the nuclear physicist who headed up the Soviet atomic bomb project — the Soviet equivalent of Manhattan Project mastermind J Robert Oppenheimer.
After the nuclear detonations, the horrific power of the bomb convinced the Soviets that they needed their nuclear programme to compete with the US. This competition to develop and stockpile the most powerful nuclear weapons became a defining feature of the Cold War.
Things reached a fever pitch during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet Union responded to American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
