Nuclear Arms Race

Essay by livlyfkingsizeHigh School, 11th gradeA+, July 2009

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IntroductionThe first nuclear bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan on the 6th of August 1945. It was to make the Japanese surrender to Americans and end World War II. In today's world there are more than 20,000 nuclear weapons due to the intense rivalry in the two great powers.

First the USA & the USSR had been allies together against fascism. But after the defeat of Germany, they both got separated. This is because the USSR president, Stalin wanted communist governments in the countries of Eastern Europe that he occupied. He also wanted the communist governments to be Pro-Soviet. This made the Western leaders see the move as a plan to spread communism.

The nuclear arms race started because the two sides had fear and mistrusted each other. They believed that they can only match each other by weapon for weapon. They believed that this was only the way they can prevent uneasy balance of terror.

The great history of mistrust between the USA & USSR ignited the nuclear arms race. By 1950, The Cold War had started and both sides were building up their weapons.

Major DevelopmentsWhen the World War II was going to start, the two German scientists Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980) and Otto Hahn (1879-1968) looked at the stream of the neutrons in a sample of uranium and they tried to split the neutrons, and they succeeded in the nuclei of some of its atoms. Nuclear fission caused by the splitting of nuclei. The energy released through nuclear fission was the source of power of the first atomic bomb. The first nuclear bomb was built by a large of team of scientists in United States, with the project leader the U.S. physicist J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). This first project was a secret research and development project...