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The Role of Nuclear Weapons in a Post Cold War World of Terr


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             The US and the Soviet Union both came to the conclusion that ever larger yields of hydrogen bombs were of little strategic value because the physical and human devastation was only proportional to the cube root of the yield and wiping out more that an entire population in a city had no real value. Both nations concluded that distributing multiple warheads against multiple cities was far more effective; thus the small MIRV became the strategic tool of choice.
             Evidence of long term radiation effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also publicized during this period. During the 1960s research indicated that above ground testing of often megaton sized nuclear weapons had led to slightly increased infant mortality rates around the world. Many Americans built bomb shelters where they would live during the inevitable nuclear exchange that would surely accompany World War III between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Workplaces stored water and food in preparation for a nuclear war that did not materialize.
             Through the early years of the cold war Americans believed that nuclear weapons were war fighting tools that were likely to be used in an international conflict involving both the US and the Soviet Union; however, nuclear weapons were not used on China during the Korean War for fear that the Soviet Union might retaliate with a nuclear weapons attack on the U.S. Yet the U.S. was willing to risk a nuclear weapons exchange with the Soviet Union in order to keep nuclear warhead tipped missiles out of Cuba.
             During the 1970s, as the nuclear weapon stockpiles of the U.S. and the Soviet Union grew from a few thousand warheads to several ten thousands of warheads, it became evident that either nation had the nuclear capacity to destroy much of civilization and could be assured of destroying the other. From that realization was born the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the policy that the U.


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