The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred. . .[It was a] strong, sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.

- General Thomas F. Farrell, describing the first nuclear test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1945

Doomsday devices

From 1945 until 1949, the United States controlled all nuclear weapons. President Harry Truman remains the only world leader to use nuclear weapons in war. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear weapon. As the USSR and U.S. shifted from World War allies to Cold War enemies, an arms race launched to develop the most and best nuclear weapons.

The nuclear arms race accelerated. The bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki leveled cities and killed tens of thousands of civilians. The U.S. and Soviet Union developed new hydrogen bombs. They were many times more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Soon, the countries were pointing tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at each other. Collectively, they could end all human life.

A MAD race to Armageddon

After Germany surrendered in World War II, leaders of the allied nations met. President Truman boasted to Stalin that his government had a secret new weapon.¹

Soon, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated this destructive power. Truman did not consult his Soviet allies before dropping the bombs. Stalin assumed the Americans wanted to intimidate the USSR. He believed that the Soviet Union needed nuclear weapons.

The arms race shaped the Cold War. The rivals focused on overproducing nuclear weapons in a strategy called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD is just as crazy as it sounds. The theory was, if two countries each possessed the ability to obliterate the other, neither would risk an attack. It prevented direct conflict between the two superpowers but created the possibility of total global destruction.

Did MAD work? Maybe. Nuclear weapons made total war on the scale of World War II unthinkable and unwinnable. Yet the MAD strategy left no room for mistakes, and in 1962 the world came very close to a big one.

Cuban Missile Crisis and non-proliferation

For 13 days in October 1962, the world was on the brink of nuclear war. The Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida. President Kennedy threatened invasion. During the standoff, nuclear war was barely averted as Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, chose not to respond to provocations from the other side. The crisis ended in compromise. Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy agreed to not invade Cuba.

The crisis alerted the world to the danger of the arms race. In 1963, the American, Soviet, and British governments signed a treaty banning atmospheric tests. In 1968, the nuclear powers signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). NPT sought to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons technology to new countries.

These agreements failed to totally contain the spread of nuclear weapons. Britain, Israel, France, and China developed nuclear weapons. Later, India and Pakistan also did so. Today, nations like Iran and North Korea argue say they have a right to nuclear weapons capability.

A race to the stars

The arms race helped launch the space race. Sending rockets into space with satellites attached demonstrated the capability to do the same with nuclear warheads. In 1957 the Soviets sent the first satellite into space. The U.S. responded by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The U.S. launched their own satellite in 1958. The Soviets continued to demonstrate their advantage by launching the first animal (a dog in 1957), the first man (1961), and the first woman (1963) into space.

The Soviet dominance in the early years of the space race helped create the perception that there was a “missile gap” between the US and USSR. However, no such gap existed. In 1961, President Kennedy promised to send a man to the moon before the end of the 1960s. The space race became a matter of national pride and security. The government directed unprecedented resources at making his promise a reality. In 1969, three American astronauts landed on the moon. The Americans and Soviets both used their space programs as evidence of their nations’ superiority.

Racing against ourselves

The space race began as a part of the arms race. Yet the race to explore the stars demonstrated the heights that humanity could achieve.

In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft.² Voyager carries two golden records. These records are humanity’s message to the stars. The records hold greetings in 55 languages—including Russian. The records are etched with the words “to the makers of music—all worlds, all times.”

In a climate of Cold War rivalry and nuclear uncertainty, space exploration offered the hope for a better future. We started this article with a quote describing the terrifying destructive capacity of the first nuclear weapon. Let’s conclude with President Jimmy Carter’s note to extraterrestrials on the Voyager records. Carter didn’t seek alien support against the Soviet Union. He spoke of our common humanity:

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization… This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

1 Stalin knew about the Americans’ nuclear weapons program before Truman. Soviet spies funneled information to the Kremlin while Truman was a U.S. senator and unaware of the project. Truman did not become vice president until the 1944 election. He then became president when Roosevelt died in April of 1945.

2 In 2012, Voyager became the first man-made craft to leave our solar system.