up America’s strategic advantage over the Soviets.34
In 1946, the United States proposed that the newly formed United Nations establish an international agency to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but preserve Washington’s status as the world’s only nuclear power. The Soviets, already on their way to developing their own atomic bomb, rejected the proposal, and the United States spurned a Soviet counterproposal to ban all nuclear weapons.35
Chronology
1939-1949 The nuclear age dawns, and the U.S.-Soviet arms race ensues.
1939 With Nazi Germany’s discovery of nuclear fission, physicist Albert Einstein warns President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the potential for a new type of “extremely powerful bombs”; Roosevelt institutes the Manhattan Project to explore the feasibility of atomic weapons.
1945 The United States drops atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II.
1949 The Soviet Union explodes an atomic bomb, marking the beginning of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race.
1950-1963 Cold War competition eventually leads to arms control efforts.
1952-53 The United States detonates the world’s first hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. … Britain becomes a nuclear power.
1957 The arms race moves into space after the Soviets launch the satellite Sputnik.
1960 France tests an atomic bomb.
1962 The Cuban missile crisis brings the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
1963 Washington and Moscow establish a hotline and sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty, banning nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, underwater and outer space but allowing underground tests.
1964-1979 Major arms control agreements advance despite Cold War tensions.
1964 China becomes the fifth nuclear-armed nation.
1968 The United Nations adopts the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which recognizes the five nuclear-armed countries; all other signatories commit to use nuclear power only for peaceful purposes.
1972 The United States and the Soviet Union sign SALT I agreement, freezing the number of long-range ballistic missiles at 1972 levels, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limits each side to a single anti-missile battery with 100 missiles and launchers.
1979 U.S. and Soviet leaders sign SALT II, limiting each country to 1,320 long-range missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, but the Senate fails to ratify it after the Soviets invade Afghanistan; both countries honor the treaty’s limits anyway.
1980-1993 Arms control progresses; the Soviet Union collapses.
1987 President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, eliminating all ballistic missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles.
1991 Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush sign START I, capping each country’s arsenal at 6,000 deployed nuclear warheads and 1,600 deployed long-range delivery systems. … After the Soviet Union collapses, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program secures Soviet nuclear weapons and fissile material held in former satellite states.
1993 U.S. and Russia sign START II, limiting each side to 3,500 deployed strategic nuclear warheads.
2000-2015 Cracks appear in arms control, but other agreements follow.
2002 President George W. Bush withdraws from ABM Treaty, citing alleged threats from rogue nations such as Iraq; in response, Russia withdraws from START II. … Iraq is later found not to be building nuclear weapons.
2010 Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sign New START, further reducing their respective deployed nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads and 700 delivery systems.
2015 Iran signs agreement with six world powers, promising to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for relief from U.N. economic sanctions.
2016-Present Trump administration begins abandoning arms control agreements.
2016 Donald Trump wins the presidency, calls Iran nuclear agreement and New START “bad deals.”
2018 Russian President Vladimir Putin unveils nuclear weapons delivery systems that can travel more than 20 times the speed of sound; Trump withdraws from Iran nuclear deal, imposes unilateral sanctions on Tehran. … Trump says he prefers a new arms reduction treaty that includes China instead of a five-year extension of New START. … Trump meets North Korean President Kim Jong Un in Singapore; they agree to work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula; Kim voluntarily freezes nuclear and missile testing.
2019 Trump and Kim fail to agree on how negotiations should proceed. … Trump withdraws from INF Treaty, citing alleged Russian violations. … Iran restarts part of its nuclear program.
2020 In a New Year’s Day speech, Kim declares he is no longer bound by his freeze on nuclear and missile testing. … After U.S. drone kills Iran’s top military commander, Tehran announces it will fully resume uranium enrichment, signaling the de facto collapse of the Iran nuclear deal (January).
The Soviets successfully tested a nuclear bomb in September 1949, sparking the arms race some had feared. Oppenheimer spoke out publicly against U.S. efforts to develop a hydrogen bomb, which would be far more destructive than the atomic bombs used in Japan, angering many in the administration.
Coming at the height of the so-called Red Scare stirred up by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., Oppenheimer’s objections led to an FBI investigation that revealed the physicist had sympathized with communism when he was a young professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At a hearing to rule on the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, Edward Teller, another prominent nuclear physicist, portrayed him as a security risk. Stripped of his clearance, Oppenheimer continued to lecture widely on the dangers of nuclear weapons, but he had no impact on the burgeoning arms race.36
Over the next two decades, the Americans and Soviets developed immensely destructive hydrogen bombs, along with neutron bombs, which leave structures standing but kill people with high levels of radiation; intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads; and a vast arsenal of small, tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use, such as nuclear landmines, artillery shells and torpedoes. With the Soviet’s successful 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, the two countries extended their rivalry into outer space. During that period, Britain, France and China also became nuclear weapons states.
In 1962, the Cold War rivalry between the superpowers reached a crisis when U.S. intelligence discovered the Soviets had deployed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from the U.S. mainland. In response, President John F. Kennedy deployed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent additional Soviet missiles from reaching the island. He also demanded that Moscow remove the existing missiles, warning he was prepared to use military force to neutralize the Soviet threat. 37
Over the next 13 days, a tense standoff ensued that brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. “I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see,” Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Defense secretary, later told Cold War historian Martin Walker.38
Eventually, Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev resolved the crisis peacefully. Kennedy agreed to Khrushchev’s proposal to remove the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. Privately, Kennedy also agreed to remove U.S. missiles