The Atomic Bomb: Part 3 - Nuclear Stockpiling

A picture the Tsar bomb from (literally) 100 miles away.
Hippies everywhere flocked to the explosion upon seeing
the 'shroom, but were disappointed to discover
it was only a cloud. 

We left off with Russia having the bomb, America having the bomb, and both of them staring at each other flexing like two of the toughest guys at the bar who have had a bit too much to drink, believing that they are indeed the strongest. Now, don't get me wrong, nukes are strong - but are they strong enough? The scientists apparently looked at the bomb and thought, yeah, it can blow up a city, but can't it get any bigger? Well, the answer is yes - it certainly can. You just need to use the power of the sun, but not in some sissy "solar power saving the world" type way. We want the "solar power annihilating the crap out of everything" way! Now, it's not putting a solar panel on a bomb, it's fusing hydrogen atoms in a similar manner to how the sun produces energy. Or exactly the same manner on a smaller scale - I don't know. Either way, the result is an explosion that dwarfs the previous ones.

The hydrogen bomb was developed just a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it wasn't the end of ever increasing bomb sizes. Bombs kept getting larger until the Russians developed the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb that was (and still is) the most powerful nuclear bomb ever created. The Tsar was dropped in 1961 as one of many nuclear tests. The blast was fifty megatons, or fifty million tons of T.N.T., well over a thousand times more powerful than the ones dropped on the Japanese. 

Well, it's a graph. It explains itself. I don't need a caption
for it, but I would feel so empty without one.

Bomb production skyrocketed as well. The idea was mutual for each superpower; if their enemy had a lot of nukes then they could destroy their country, so they had to ensure that they in turn held enough nukes to destroy them back, thus preventing them from firing in the first place. So on they built, ensuring that even if the Russians wanted to bomb Buford, Wyoming (wikipedia tells me it's the smallest town in America, with a population of one, somehow) they could do it, and if America wanted to bomb the smallest Russian town right back they certainly could as well. It was an arms race, which works perfectly with my metaphor of the two tough guys in the bar, but I'll pass on adding another pun to this blog series.

So just how many bombs did they build? In 1947 the U.S. had 13. 1953 saw that number up to 1,100. Late '60s, 31,000. Between the two of them there were 60,000 nuclear weapons with 36 different types hanging around in the world. 

The nukes weren't just sitting there, though; plenty of them were being used for testing, just not on people. A few hundred were tested but the environmental effects were worrisome, causing the signing of a treaty in 1963 to no longer test the bombs in the atmosphere, space, on the ground or underwater. Great! That just meant that they would test them underground, where another eight hundred or so were tested until they stopped in 1992. Take that, mother Earth!

A crater left by a nuclear test, awaiting the winter to be
once more used as a hill for tobogganing.

While I won't delve deeply into the happenings of the Cold War, both sides eventually pulled out and didn't bomb each other to smithereens, leaving us in some post-apocalyptic video game world. But what would have happened had the bomb not been there in the first place? Would the Soviet Union and the United States have fought with troops instead? It could very well have caused another colossal war. Since, the number of nuclear bombs has decreased greatly, but the number of countries that own them hasn't. The U.S. and Russia obviously still have them, but add to that list India, Israel, China, France, Pakistan and North Korea, according to the Huffington Post. Now, those countries have a very, very small piece of the pie, but Japan would be the first to remind you of what just two nuclear bombs, much smaller than what we have now, can do. 

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The information for this blog was taken from the documentary The Bomb, a PBS program.