Online resources to accompany the Teacher's Guide for The Fog of War, A Project of The Choices Program and Critical Oral History Project, Watson Insititute for International Studies — Brown University
Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear weapons were first developed by the United States. The United States dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killing more than 150,000 people and forcing Japan to surrender. The Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device in 1949.
The explosive force of nuclear weapons is measured in kilotons (thousands) or megatons (millions) of tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive force of the thirteen kilotons, equivalent to thirteen thousand tons of TNT. The largest bomb ever tested was a Soviet hydrogen bomb of fifty-nine megatons or about 4,500 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Today most nuclear weapons are between one hundred kilotons and one megaton.
What types of nuclear weapons are there?
Nuclear weapons are usually categorized as strategic (long-range), intermediate (medium-range), or tactical (short-range). Strategic nuclear weapons include land-based ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) capable of hitting a target six thousand miles away in thirty minutes or less; submarine base SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles), which generally have shorter ranges and less accuracy but are harder to attack than ICBMs; and gravity bombs on bombers. Another kind of strategic weapon is the cruise missile, which can be launched from land, sea, or air. Cruise missiles fly like airplanes, while ballistic missiles rise high above the atmosphere and fall towards their targets almost vertically. A cruise missile may take much longer to reach its target than a ballistic missile, but it is also easier to deploy and to conceal. Intermediate nuclear weapons are generally shorter-range versions of strategic weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons include nuclear land mines, artillery shells, anti-aircraft explosives, and other short-range systems. Some have explosive yields of less than a kiloton, actually smaller than some non-nuclear weapons.
What is mutually assured destruction?
With the development of nuclear weapons came pressing strategic, political, and moral questions about their use in warfare. The idea of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) has been a cornerstone of U.S. thinking on the nuclear arms race for many years. Although MAD got is name in the 1960s, the idea goes back to the earliest days of the atomic era. The idea is simply this: if one side were to attack the other with nuclear weapons, the other side would be able to launch a nuclear response that would devastate the original attacker. Knowing this, both sides are deterred from attacking.
MAD
is not really a nuclear strategy. It does not tell either country what weapons
to build or how to use them, Rather, it is a condition in which countries recognize
that they cannot launch a nuclear attack without fear of a devastating response.
MAD has been criticized for its threat to civilians, because the best way to ensure that a nuclear response causes immense damage is to aim at people and industries. Since people and factories tend to be clustered in cities, many weapons in the United States and Russia are presumably aimed at cities.
Many people think of MAD as a basic and obvious truth of the nuclear era. As President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev said in a joint declaration in 1986, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." Nevertheless, both the United States and Russia have plans for fighting-and, if possible, winning-a nuclear war.
What is nuclear proliferation?
Since the United States exploded the first nuclear weapon in 1945, it has tried to keep other nations from acquiring these weapons. Only seven nations have declared themselves to have nuclear arsenals: The United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan. Most experts believe that Israel has nuclear weapons, although Israel has never admitted this.
Some experts argue that it makes little difference to the United States how many other countries have nuclear weapons. They argue that nuclear weapons can help keep the peace among other nations just as they have between the United States and Soviet Union. On the other hand, the spread of nuclear weapons increases the chance of an accident, of unauthorized use of those weapons, or that they will fall into the hands of terrorists.
What nuclear threats exist today?
Today, the two greatest nuclear powers remain Russia and the United States. Both the U.S. and Russian arsenals are capable of virtually destroying humanity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia and its neighbors inherited approximately 27,000 nuclear warheads and the world's largest stockpile of nuclear bomb materials.
Tactical nuclear weapons had been widely dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. By early 1992, the authorities in Moscow had concentrated all of them in Russia. The strategic nuclear missiles presented a different problem as most of them could not be easily moved. Eighty-five percent of the missiles were based in Russia, but that still left sizeable forces in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.
Following the Soviet collapse, significant progress was achieved in reversing the nuclear arms race. Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus agreed to turn their nuclear arsenals over to Russia. In addition, U.S. and Russian leaders in 1993 signed a breakthrough treaty, START II. This called for then-unprecedented cuts in nuclear weapons stockpiles.
In May 2002, Presidents Bush and Putin signed the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions. This requires each country to reduce its operational nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the end of 2012. The treaty does not require that weapons that are not operational be destroyed.
Today, Russia and the United States have approximately 28,800 warheads of the some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Not all are deployed and ready to be used. The United States has 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 1,600 tactical nuclear weapons that are deployed and ready to be used. Russia has approximately 5,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 3,400 tactical weapons that are deployed and ready to be used.