Nuclear Weapons in Europe

Introduction

A Nuclear weapon is any weapon that gets its destructive power from the transformation of matter in atoms into energy. They include missiles, bombs, artillery shells, mines and torpedoes. Another name for nuclear weapons is Atomic bombs or Hydrogen bombs. The United States was the first country to ever use a Nuclear weapon in battle against Japan (Von Hippel, 32).

The major arguments for a test ban were first proposed in the 1950's. Today, however, the stopping of radioactive fallout and the superpower arms race are still in negotiation. Nations have sought to limit the testing of nuclear weapons to protect people and the environment from nuclear radiation and to slow the development of nuclear weapons. In 1963, Great Britain, and the United States negotiated the first test limitation treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The Treaty's signers agreed not to test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, or underwater. The only testing that was allowed was underground testing (Budanski, 30).

Attempts to control the number of nuclear weapons in the world began about 1970. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) was a convention held by the United States and the Great Britain to limit the numbers in nuclear weapons. In 1982, the United States and the Great Britain began the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). Unlike the SALT talks, these were aimed at the number of nuclear weapons each country could obtain. Then there was another treaty signed in 1987 which was called the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF). This treaty called for the dismantling of ground-launched nuclear missiles.

The 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. This made the Western leaders see the move as a plan to spread communism (Von Hippel, 34).

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 (Mitchell, A7 Column 1).

Major Developments

When 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 ...