On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29
bomber dropped Little Boy, an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, Japan. The force from the blast caused
almost every building in the city to collapse, and
was equal to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT. “[…]
the United States’ sole possession of the atomic
bomb dictated that Soviet tactics would be indirect
rather than direct. Utilizing infiltration,
subversion, intimidation, propaganda, obstructionism,
and proxies, Russian leaders would work tirelessly
to draw non-communist regimes into the Soviet
sphere.” (Jones X) The Soviet Union was “[…] a
police state committed to dogmas of class war and
capitalist conspiracy and denied countervailing
checks of free speech and press” (Jones 56) Four
years later, the U.S. heard the news that the Soviet
Union had made its own atomic bomb. On November 1,
1952, the U.S. detonated the first thermonuclear
device, the hydrogen bomb. The H-bomb had such an
amazing force that it even frightened the scientists
who had created it. It had a force equal to 10.4
million tons of TNT, a force 696.8 times greater than
that of the atomic bomb. In August of 1953, the
Soviet Union exploded its own H-bomb and the massive
arms race of the Cold War began. The massive arms
build up was a necessary part of the Cold War even
though it was a waste of a large amount of money and
resources, but without it there would have been
a “worldwide holocaust.” (Jones 79)
