The US government’s decision to develop a hydrogen bomb, first tested in 1952, committed the United States to an ever-escalating arms race with the Soviet Union. The arms race led many Americans to fear that nuclear war could happen at any time, and the US government urged citizens to prepare to survive an atomic bomb.

An arms race may heighten fear and hostility on the part of the countries involved, but whether this contributes to war is hard to gauge. Some empirical studies do find that arms races are associated with an increased likelihood of war.

They both spent billions and billions of dollars trying to build up huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Near the end of the Cold War the Soviet Union was spending around 27% of its total gross national product on the military. This was crippling to their economy and helped to bring an end to the Cold War.

Nuclear Weapons These include plutonium, uranium, benzene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), strontium, cesium, mercury and cyanide. All of these materials have negative impacts on the environment and often find their way into oceans, rivers and soil harming wildlife living local to the production of the weaponry.

The nuclear arms race did include ever advancing, and ever more competitive technologies. From simple atomic bombs dropped from airplanes, each side quickly progressed to Hydrogen bombs, then to ballistic missiles, then to multiple warheads, then to missiles that were submarine based.

Known as the Cold War, this conflict began as a struggle for control over the conquered areas of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and continued into the early 1990s. Initially, only the United States possessed atomic weapons, but in 1949 the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and the arms race began.

When did the arms race start? A. It started in 1945, when the United States exploded its first atomic bomb on July 16 in Alamogordo, N.M., after a massive research campaign known as the Manhattan Project. The successful test of the bomb led to its use on two Japanese cities in August 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As World War II transformed both the United States and the USSR, turning the nations into formidable world powers, competition between the two increased. Following the defeat of the Axis powers, an ideological and political rivalry between the United States and the USSR gave way to the start of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, Germany became the center for the conflict between Communism and Democracy. Germany was the site where all the tensions between the two ideals was played out. Divided Germany had also caused a social split to occur between the Eastern and Western Germans.

During the Cold War, Americans were convinced the Soviet Union posed a grave threat to their country and the rest of the planet and that, as the leader of the free world, the United States had a responsibility to resist Soviet expansionism.

The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. fought the Cold War for 45 years. It consisted of covert action, proxy wars and a nearly-complete polarization between the two sides among the rest of the world. In 1991, the U.S.S.R collapsed suddenly and completely, becoming a number of independent countries and the Russian Federation.

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