Nuclear Arms Race Research Paper

The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During the Cold War, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though none engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.
The first nuclear weapon was created by the Manhattan Project during the Second World War and was developed to be used against the Axis powers. Scientists of the Soviet Union were aware of the potential of nuclear weapons and had also been conducting research in the field.
The Soviet Union was not informed officially of the Manhattan Project until Stalin was briefed at the Potsdam Conference on July 24, 1945, by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, eight days after the first successful test of a nuclear weapon. Despite their wartime military alliance, the United States and Britain had not trusted the Soviets enough to keep knowledge of the Manhattan Project safe from German spies: there were also concerns that, as an ally, the Soviet Union would request and expect to receive technical details of the new weapon.
When President Truman informed Stalin of the weapons, he was surprised at how calmly Stalin reacted to the news and thought that Stalin had not understood what he had been told.
Other members of the United States and British delegations who closely observed the exchange formed the same conclusion.
In fact Stalin had long been aware of the program, despite the Manhattan Project having a secret classification so high that, even as Vice-President, Truman did not know about it or the development of the weapons. Truman was not informed until shortly after he became president. A ring of spies operating within the Manhattan Project, (including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall) had kept Stalin well informed of American
progress.
In August 1945, on Truman's orders, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki by the B-29 bombers named Enola Gay and Bockscar respectively.
"Little Boy" was the codename for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets of the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, Heavy, of the United States Army Air Forces. It was the first atomic bomb to be used as a weapon. The second, the "Fat Man", was dropped three days later on Nagasaki.
The weapon was developed by the Manhattan Project during World War II. It derived its explosive power from the nuclear fission of uranium 235. The Hiroshima bombing was the second artificial nuclear explosion in history, after the Trinity test, and the first uranium-based detonation. Approximately 600 to 860 milligrams of matter in the bomb was converted into the active energy of heat and radiation (see mass-energy equivalence for detail). It exploded with an energy between 13 and 18 kilotons of TNT (54 and 75 TJ) (estimates vary). It has been estimated that 130,000 to 150,000 persons had died by the end of December 1945. Its design was not tested in advance, unlike the more complex plutonium bomb (Fat Man). The available supply of enriched uranium was very small at that time, and it was felt that the simple design of a uranium "gun" type bomb was so sure to work that there was no need to test it at full scale.
"Fat Man" is the codename for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States on August 9, 1945. It was the second of only two nuclear weapons to be used in warfare to date (the other being "Little Boy"), and its detonation caused the third man-made nuclear explosion. The name also refers more generically to the early nuclear weapon designs of U.S. weapons based on the "Fat Man" model. It was an implosion-type weapon with a plutonium core, similar to "The gadget", the experimental device detonated only a month earlier in New Mexico.
"Fat Man" was possibly named after Winston Churchill, though Robert Serber said in his memoirs that as the "Fat Man" bomb was round and fat, he named it after Sydney Greenstreet's character of "Kasper Gutman" in The Maltese Falcon.
The original target for the bomb was the city of Kokura, but obscuring clouds necessitated changing course to the alternative target, Nagasaki. "Fat Man" was dropped from the B-29 bomber Bockscar, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney of the 393d Bombardment Squadron, Heavy, and exploded at 11:02 AM (JST), at an altitude of about 1,650 feet (500 m), with a yield of about 21 kilotons of TNT or 88 terajoules. Because of poor visibility due to cloud cover, the bomb missed its intended detonation point, and damage was somewhat less extensive than that in Hiroshima. An estimated 39,000 people were killed outright by the bombing at Nagasaki, and a further 25,000 were injured. Thousands more died later from related blast and burn injuries, and hundreds more from radiation illnesses from exposure to the bomb's initial radiation. The bombing raid on Nagasaki had the third highest fatality rate in World War II after the nuclear strike on Hiroshima and the March 9/10 1945 fire bombing raid on Tokyo.
A hydrogen bomb is, by far, the most destructive weapon that mankind has ever invented. It is the most powerful type of nuclear bomb, as much as 25,000 times the yield of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Unlike conventional atom bombs (also known as A-bombs), which release energy by fissioning (breaking apart) heavy atomic nuclei like uranium and plutonium, a hydrogen bomb releases energy by fusing together light nuclei like tritium or deuterium, converting even more matter into energy. When Truman authorized the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said that the weapons used the same power that the Sun did, but that wasn't actually true -- the Sun uses nuclear fusion, not nuclear fission. Thus, a hydrogen bomb really does release the power that fuels the Sun.
The “Installation” was a secret city in the central Volga region of the USSR where a special design bureau was creating nuclear weapons. Even the name of the city – Sarov, once the site of a famous Orthodox monastery – was secret for some forty years. Tamm and Sakharov moved to the Installation in spring 1950. While the theoretical group headed by Zeldovich continued to work on the Truba design, Tamm’s team worked on Sakharov’s Sloyka. The latter provided the first Soviet H-bomb, successfully tested on 12 August 1953.