![]() That year, President Kennedy came to see a way out of the looming arms race. The commission reported that experimental devices would be ready for explosive testing by the end of 1963. McNamara, was informed that the Atomic Energy Commission was ready to build the American equivalent of a Tsar Bomba. Wellerstein states, the defense secretary, Robert S. Wellerstein quotes a scientist at the Sandia weapons lab - one of the nation’s three design centers for nuclear arms - as declaring that the American military wanted superbombs “even though no known targets justify such weapons.” The detonation of Tsar Bomba in October 1961 gave the issue new urgency. Wellerstein reports that the new president was told that a 100-megaton weapon would be six feet wide and 12 feet long - easy for a large bomber to carry and drop. A once-secret Air Force history said enthusiasm for the giant weapon cooled as the study found that “lethal radioactivity might not be contained within the confines of an enemy state.”īy January 1961, when Kennedy took office, plans for a lesser superbomb had grown more detailed. In 1958, the Air Force chief of staff called for a study of weapons up to 1,000 megatons, Dr. The lobbying intensified as the military added its voice. He added that disclosure of Kennedy’s calculated nonresponse to the pushy clamor showed his “deep revulsion for nuclear weapons.” ![]() Cohen’s book lays out the president’s 1963 pivot to diplomacy that helped make the groundbreaking arms treaty possible. Wellerstein reveals “an untold story that’s terrifying, sobering and illuminating.” Mr. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History,” said in an interview that Dr. But he decided not to go in the bomb direction.”Īndrew Cohen, author of “Two Days in June: John F. “It’s clear that Kennedy was on the fence. “It went all the way to the top,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and the study’s author, said in an interview. He chose not only to ignore the military’s appeals for deadlier arms, but to sponsor and sign an East-West treaty that precluded more superweapons. The report shows that the secret debate over what to do about the unprecedented Soviet blast was ended by President John F. A new study, based on recently declassified documents, offers insights into how an earlier president resolved a comparable dilemma. As the device shattered all records, it sent shock waves through the American defense establishment: How should the United States respond? Did the nation need bigger, more destructive arms? Was it wise to do nothing? What was the best way to protect the nation from the deadly stirrings of a belligerent foe?Īmerican policymakers now face similar questions as bold rivals pursue novel delivery systems for their nuclear arms. Sixty years ago on Saturday, the Soviet Union detonated the world’s most powerful nuclear weapon, with a force 3,333 times that of the bomb used on Hiroshima.
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