Nuclear Weapons Testing and Cold War America

Réalisé pour la télévision en 1965 par le cinéaste Peter Watkins, The War Game évoque une attaque nucléaire contre l’Angleterre. Ce docufiction est à l’origine d’un scandale politique majeur pour la BBC, qui l’a commandé, produit puis aussitôt banni au prétexte d’endiguer la «panique morale» que le film aurait pu susciter. Il ne sera finalement diffusé sur la BBC qu’à une seule reprise, le soir du 31 juillet 1985, assorti d’une longue introduction mettant en garde les téléspectateurs, avant de quitter définitivement les petits écrans britanniques.
Visionner le film : https://archive.org/details/TheWarGame_201405

Bő három és fél évvel az 1941. december 7-i Pearl Harbor elleni japán támadás, s alig hetekkel az első sikeres kísérleti atomrobbantás után amerikai bombázók két atombombát dobtak először Hirosima majd Nagaszaki sűrűn lakott városára. Ezzel a világ a gyakorlatban is belépett az atomkorszakba, s azzal a nukleáris fegyverek világába.E tanulmány az amerikai fegyverrendszerek, s az ahhoz kötött doktrína fejlődését mutatja be.

Karl Barth's address to the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, NL, in 1948. The agenda was focused on how the church should address the social problems of a world understood as in danger from its own developments, and on the solutions the churches could bring to bear on those problems under the rubric of "salvation." Barth, of course, was having none of this—because salvation is God's job, and it is already done.

The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multi-volume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict.

The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture.
Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading.
The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.
FEATURES
Includes more than 1,500 entries covering all facets of the Cold War from its origins to its aftermath, including all political, diplomatic, military, social, economic, and cultural aspects
Incorporates the scholarship of more than 200 internationally recognized
contributors from around the world, many writing about events and  issues from the perspective of their country of origin

Offers more than 100 original documents—a collection that draws heavily on material from archives in China, Eastern
Europe, and the former Soviet Union

Provides hundreds of powerful images and dozens of informative maps detailing specific military conflicts and movements of various groups

Includes a detailed chronology of important events that occurred before, during, and after the Cold War

The paper explores how the Bravo nuclear weapon test in 1954 sparked the emergence of modern concepts of the Earth as a single ecosystem. It describes how this awareness had two primary impacts. First, it led to military strategies of using radioactive fallout as a primary weapon effect of a nuclear attack, allowing the annihilation of entire populations. Secondly, it facilitated the emergence of concepts of a global ecosystem by demonstrating that when massive amounts of radionuclides were generated by a thermonuclear detonation they became distributed throughout the whole system. While 1945 may have been the birth of the anthropocene,1954 was the birth of human awareness of this change.

"Award-winning journalist David Robie was on board the Greenpeace environmental ship Rainbow Warrior on its last mission to Rongelap Atoll in May 1985 and continued to stay with the ship until it reached Auckland in July. Robie’s account of this voyage – of the Marshall Islands community poisoned by nuclear fallout and of the fatal bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French secret service – remains a definitive work on Western treachery in the Pacific, but also shows the power of good people who were willing to stand up and be counted when others desperately needed help."
‘ One of the most iniquitous stories of the nuclear age. ’
New Internationalist
‘ This is THE book of the last five months of the first Rainbow Warrior. ’
Rainbow Warrior skipper Peter Willcox
‘ Robie’s analysis places the bombing squarely in the context of the South Pacific politics and people, providing a
much-needed human backdrop. ’
Steve Sawyer, Greenpeace Magazine

Decamous, G., 2022. Nuclear Warfare. In: Kurtz, L.R. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, vol. 2. Elsevier, Academic Press, pp. 200–209. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-820195-4.00269-7.

The main turning points of the Atomic Age are discussed through an analysis of nuclear weaponry, its buildup, and its global effects on people, the environment, and culture. Some countries covered are the United States, Japan, Russia, the Marshall Islands, Polynesia, France, India, North Korea, Canada, and Iran.

Outline
Building the Bombs: The Manhattan Project
The Types of Nuclear Bombs and Their Might
The Effects of Nuclear Bombs: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Cold War and the Effects of the Tests
    The US Tests in the Marshall Islands
    The French Tests in Polynesia
    Soviet Russia
The Effects of Nuclear A- and H-Bombs: Uranium Mining
Nuclear Military Strategies
    Deterrence
    Censorship
Antinuclear Peace Movements: Nuclear Culture
Two More Nuclear Nations: Iran and North Korea
      Iran
      North Korea
Nuclear War Since Hiroshima Until Today

"Two nuclear tests occurring off the Western Australian coast in 1956 were vital for Britain’s understanding of the principles of the hydrogen bomb. Mastery of this technology was central in restoring cooperation between the United States of America
and the United Kingdom. These experiments were highly influential in shaping the global security environment but have been overshadowed by commentaries exploring tests that occurred on the Australian mainland. During the Royal Commission into
British Nuclear Testing in Australia of 1984 and 1985, there emerged a claim that theyield of one test was hidden from Australian officials. To this day, the yield of this test
is debated, and the discrepancy in the figures cited is significant. This paper explores the significance of this test and the origins of contested claims as to its yield."

When David Robie set sail on the Rainbow Warrior for the Marshall Islands, he sensed a major story in the offing. The Warrior, flagship of the international Greenpeace environmental protest movement, was going to Rongelap to evacuate the inhabitants from their homeland. American nuclear testing in the Central Pacific in the 1950s had snowed radioactive fallout on the islanders. A legacy of radiation-related diseases had sprung up and, warned radiation experts, the worst was yet to come for the Rongelapese. Those diseases would peak around 40 years after the nuclear blast that brought the poison snowflakes. New Zealander Robie, 40, who has been covering the Pacific as a freelance reporter for the past eight years, had plans to write a book about the emotional forced migration of the Rongelapese to a safer island. [By John Richardson, Fiji Sunday Sun, 25 May 1986].

The South Pacific, or Oceana as it is technically called, is divided into three clusters of islands: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.  Around 3000 B.C. Austronesians migrated from what is today China and Taiwan southeast to Palau, the Marianas, and Caroline islands and westward across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. As the Austronesians migrated to the islands of New Guinea, they mixed with the indigenous Papuan cultures, which developed into a trade circuit known as the Kula ring between Papua New Guinea, Milne Bay, and the Trobriands, Dobu, and Solomon islands.

Under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Pope divided the world between Spanish and Portuguese claims along a north-south meridian in the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, the Portuguese colonized the Pacific from their explorations around the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean while Spain colonized it from New Spain (Mexico today) and Peru in the east.

The English claimed territory in the South Pacific by virtue of the three voyages of Captain Cook between 1768 and 1779. In the 1830s the French began sending whaling ships to the South Pacific to compete with the British. At the same time French Roman Catholic missionaries) began to compete with Britain’s London Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Missionary Society. They established colonies on Tahiti, the Marquesas islands, and New Caledonia.

In 1856 the German company of Johann Godeffroy and Sohn (GuS) from Hamburg established a base on Samoan island of Upolu. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhem I expanded into the Pacific. The German colonization of large parts of the Pacific Islands prompted first Britain and France and then Spain, the United States, and Chile to follow suit. Britain took control of most of the southwestern Pacific and France most of eastern Polynesia, while Germany gained large parts of the equatorial and north regions of the western Pacific. The United States the Hawaiian Islands and Guam in 1898 and Samoa in 1899; and France took over New Caledonia and Loyalties in the western Pacific and the Societies, the Marquesas, and other islands in the eastern Pacific.

After the defeat of Germany in World War I, Japan received mandates under the League of Nations for all of Micronesia north of the equator, Australia received the mandate for New Guinea and Nauru, and New Zealand for German Samoa (Western Samoa today). In World War II Japan conquered not only Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines, but also many of the islands in the South Pacific. After World War II the newly created United Nations created a new system of trusteeships to replace the old League of Nations mandates. New Zealand was given the trustee ship for Western Samoa, and American Samoa was administered as a “military colony” by the US Department of Navy until 1951, when military technology made its strategic importance obsolete. It then was administered as an “unincorporated territory” of the United States. Guam remained “an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States.”

The Caroline Islands, the Northern Marianas, Palau and the Marshall Islands became the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in 1947 under a special arrangement between the UN and the United States. The true reason for this arrangement became clear. Between 1946 and 1962 the United States conducted more than uranium and/or hydrogen bomb explosion on Pacific Islands, such as Bikini and the Marshall Islands. In order to conduct these tests the United States evacuated the Micronesians on Bikini and Enewetak and then destroyed the islands. The fall-out of these tests contaminated neighboring islands.

The history of the South Pacific is an example of two types of imperialism: colonialism and anti-colonial free trade. The Spaniards, Portuguese, British, French, Germans, and even the New Zealanders established colonies that they settled and exploited for their natural resources and labor. The United States, on the other hand, followed another kind of imperialism. With the exception of Hawai’i, which was colonized first by Protestant missionaries and then by American pineapple growers and later incorporated as the fiftieth state, the United States was more interested in controlling these islands to protect trade routes and for strategic military purposes. As a result, the South Pacific exemplifies not the better angels of our nature, but the opposite.

The historic material culture produced by American Cold War nuclear weapons testing includes objects of scientific inquiry that can be generally categorized as being either ephemeral or enduring. Objects deemed to be ephemeral were of a less substantial nature, being impermanent and expendable in a nuclear test, while enduring objects were by nature more durable and long-lasting. Although all of these objects were ultimately subject to disappearance, the processes by which they were transformed, degraded, or destroyed prior to their disappearing differ. Drawing principally upon archaeological theory, this paper proposes a functional dichotomy for categorizing and studying the historical trajectories of nuclear weapons testing technoscience artifacts. In examining the transformation patterns of steel towers and concrete blockhouses in particular, it explores an associated loss of scientific method that accompanies a science object's disappearance.

Is the world entering a new cold war? The answer would be both yes and no. Yes if we mean a protracted international rivalry, for cold wars in this sense are as old as history itself. Some became hot, some didn’t: no law guarantees either outcome. No if we mean the Cold War, which we capitalize because it originated and popularized the term. That struggle took place at a particular time (from 1945–47 to 1989–91), among particular adversaries (the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies), and over particular issues (post–World War II power balances, ideological clashes, arms races). None of those issues looms as large now, and where parallels do exist—growing bipolarity, intensifying polemics, sharpening distinctions between autocracies and democracies—the context is quite different.

Many factors are identified as causes of nuclear proliferation, but three stands out among them. These comprise the international and domestic political environment, technical capabilities and motivation. This article explores, on the one hand, the conditions that are conducive for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, whilst also suggesting strategies that can effectively address the problem. The authors use the South African episode as a case study. They identify the role of technology and motivations in the development of South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme and claim that the possession of technological capability is not a sufficient cause of nuclear proliferation. Rather, the presence of strong motivations in conjunction with sufficient technical capability leads to nuclear proliferation.

Many factors are identified as causes of nuclear proliferation, but three stands out among them. These comprise the international and domestic political environment, technical capabilities and motivation. This article explores, on the one hand, the conditions that are conducive for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, whilst also suggesting strategies that can effectively address the problem. The authors use the South African episode as a case study. They identify the role of technology and motivations in the development of South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme and claim that the possession of technological capability is not a sufficient cause of nuclear proliferation. Rather, the presence of strong motivations in conjunction with sufficient technical capability leads to nuclear proliferation.

Bomb-produced 14 C has been used to make valid estimates of a ge for various marine organisms for 25 years, but fishages that lead to birth years earlier than the period ofincrease in 14 C lose their time specificity. As a result, bomb 14 C da ting is limited to a minimum a ge from the last year of prebomb levels because the temporal variation in 14 C in the marine surface la y er is negligible for decades before c. 1958. The longevity of red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) in the Gul f of Mexico remains unresolved despite various forms of support for a ges near 50-60 years. Although the a ge and growth of red snapper have been verified or va1idated to a limited extent, some scepticism remains about longevity estimates that exceed 30 years. In this stud y, red snapper otoliths were analysed for 14 C using a novellaser ablation-acceleratormass spectrometry technique to provide a continuous record of 14 C uptake. This approach provideda basis for a ge validatian that extends beyond the normallimits of bomb 14 C dating with confrrmation of a 60-year longevity for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. nuclear tests in Pacific in the 1950s spurred an international movement to ban atmospheric nuclear testing.  The  North Korean foreign minister's recent warning that Pyongyang may conduct an atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific has renewed fears about radioactive fallout and the perils of testing missiles and nuclear devices that first emerged in the early-Cold War.