Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read Online Free PDF Page A

conflicts and numerous smaller fronts around the globe. Nuclear arsenals kept the two superpowers not only from a nuclear conflict, but from a major direct conventional-force conflict as well.
    The race to develop the “Super”—the H-bomb—began right after Russia exploded its first A-bomb. In 1952, the Americans vaporized an atoll in the South Pacific with a massive hydrogen device, one far too large to qualify as a true bomb. The Soviet H-bomb was tested in August 1953 on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The vast power of these hydrogen bombs made destruction not merely of cities, but of civilization itself, a plausible prospect.
    In December 1953 President Eisenhower announced his Atoms for Peace program, when only three powers—the U.S., Soviet Union, and United Kingdom—had gone nuclear. His idea was to provide a compelling reason for countries not to pursue nuclear energy for military purposes. In exchange for such forbearance they were to be guaranteed help in developing peaceful atomic energy uses. Under the aegis of Atoms for Peace, dozens of nations received economic and technical aid to develop commercial nuclear technology. Coupled with America’s precipitous 1946 disclosure of Manhattan Project technology, knowledge pertaining to nuclear weapons began spreading around the globe. As there is no bright line between commercial research and military use (see the “Interlude” at the end of chapter 7 ), out popped the proliferation genie.
    The year 1957 brought new urgency to the technology arms race with two dramatic Soviet triumphs. That August, the Soviet Union tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a ballistic missile with a range further than 5,500 kilometers—around 3,500 miles, roughly the distance from Nova Scotia to Portugal. Such a device was hardly inevitable: FDR’s wartime science adviser, Dr. Vannevar Bush, told Congress in December 1945 that such a machine could never work. But Stalin wanted it; in 1947 he was telling senior deputies that an ICBM “could be an effective straitjacket for that noisy shopkeeper Harry Truman.” Two months after the Soviets tested their ICBM, they had their second triumph: they launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik (“traveler”).
    Between 1957 and 1967 the superpowers raced to close the window of nation-ending catastrophic vulnerability the new technologies had opened. They hid their intercontinental ballistic missiles underground in storage cylinders, encasing underground launch pads, all bearing the gentle agrarian name of “missile silos.” They hid intermediate-range ballistic missiles under the oceans in submarines, and they retained air bases for their strategic bombers. As technology improved, this “triad” of nuclear systems (a nuclear “system” is a weapon plus the platform on which that weapon is mounted) reduced each side’s vulnerability to a surprise nuclear first strike, what nuclear strategists call the “bolt from the blue.”
    In the first quarter century of nuclear weaponry, five nations conducted hundreds of above ground tests. Almost half came in 1962 alone, the peak of worldwide nuclear testing. Most of these were U.S. tests in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean on the Marshall Islands. A few were British tests in the Australian outback and on Christmas Island. France tested in Algeria. China tested its devices in its vast western interior, and the rest were Soviet tests in Kazakhstan or in the Arctic at Novaya Zemlya. Amid rising awareness of nuclear fallout, the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that they would confine future tests to shots fired deep in underground testing caverns.
    To reduce the risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers, a quarter century of intense efforts at arms control followed the all-out race. Arms control became a dominant theme in 1967 when the United States announced it would unilaterally freeze—that