In the years following world war two, the nuclear capabilities of several world superpowers terrified the rest of the world. The usage of nuclear weapons by the United States in Japan opened peoples eyes to the devastation that these new- unconventional- weapons could bring to the modern battlefield. Several countries, namely the United States and the Soviet Union, began to rapidly expand their nuclear capabilities. Throughout the 1950s, extensive research was conducted to increase the explosive power of these devices and miniaturize the weapons for usage on smaller delivery devices. The destructive power of these devices increased exponentially. In addition, this research yielded another -just as worrisome- result, the miniaturization of these warheads lead to the possibility, and testing, of new delivery devices. Although some of these ideas never panned out or were deemed grossly impractical (digging long tunnels to deliver nuclear weapons under their target causing a tectonic reaction, massive torpedos, or space borne weapons, just to name a few) , a few did take shape. As adapted from the American Kettering bug and SLAM, Soviet Gird-06, and German V1 and V2 programs, the modern cruise missile had finally become a feasible means of high precision, high payload, long range strikes in the early 1960s. Mounting nuclear warheads on these weapons (which by this point could be mounted on ships, submarines, trucks, planes, ect.) meant that a nuclear attack could be launched from virtually any military installation in the world. To make matters worse, the nuclear powers used these miniaturized nukes to make bigger and badder warheads. A warhead from 1963 could now have explosive power equivalent to dozens of the WWII era bombs. Around this point, in the early to mid 1960s, the ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) was the new way to deliver a payload (conventional or nuclear) from thousands of miles away, in minutes, within a few dozen yards, and exploding with force of 170 kilotons (each warhead). The nuclear triad was now complete. Nuclear powers now could deliver their weapons from the air, land, or sea, any of which would be a devastating blow.
This is a very interesting article because it plays on one of the biggest factors of the cold war, that being the fear of a nuclear war. The obvious reason the cold war was so potentially deadly was that these superpowers had employed the tactic of MAD, to try and scare the other into submitting. Eventually, even more, powerful nuclear devices were created like the Soviet RDS - 220 bombs which had a package of 50 megatons, almost 1000 times more powerful than an individual ICBM warhead.
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