8/12/2023 0 Comments Soviet vs us nuclear stockpilePhysicists at the labs work on the best experimental equipment that money can buy, and their funding has ballooned under the Trump administration. The so-called virtualization of US nuclear tests meant that weapons scientists would employ the most powerful lasers and supercomputers in the world to understand these weapons instead of blowing them up. Today, the nation’s nuclear weapons research is focused on reliability testing and maintenance of the roughly 4,000 active warheads in its arsenal, a program broadly referred to as “stockpile stewardship.” After the test ban, the US government lavished funding on the new stewardship program to keep the nation’s weapons up to snuff. The US conducted its last explosive nuclear test in September, 1992. A small army of US weapons scientists blew up a nuclear weapon every chance they got, and at the height of the nation’s testing program they were averaging one detonation per week. They blew up nuclear weapons in the ocean. By the time the US signed the United Nations Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996 and agreed to stop blowing up nukes, American physicists and engineers had conducted more than 1,000 tests. Despite a lifetime of activism by Bainbridge and many of his colleagues, nuclear tests didn’t end with the war. But it wasn’t the last nuclear explosion. The bombing of Nagasaki was the second and final time a country has deployed a nuclear weapon in combat. It effectively ended World War II, but it came at the price of well over 100,000 civilian lives and the enduring suffering of those who survived. Less than a month later, the United States dropped the same type of bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, just three days after detonating a smaller nuclear warhead over Hiroshima. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s lead scientist: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”Īnd he was right. As the light from the explosion faded, one of the architects of the bomb, Kenneth Bainbridge, gave a pithy appraisal of the event to J. The blast bathed the peaks of the nearby Oscura Mountains in a blinding white light, and dozens of scientific observers watching from 20 miles away reported feeling an immense heat wash over them. The plutonium bomb used for the Trinity test left a 5-foot crater in the ground and turned the surrounding desert floor into a radioactive green glass. Just before sunrise on July 16, 1945-75 years ago today-a patch of New Mexican desert was incinerated during the first trial of the most destructive weapon ever created.
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