The Cold War

(From left to right Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin)

By: William Fox

There can be no one clear cause of a war. The presumed causes of the Cold War are; American Fear of communist attack, USSR’s aim of spreading world communism, USSR’s fear of American attack. The leader of America at the time of the Cold War was President Harry Truman who came into power in April 1945 after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The leader of the USSR was Joseph Stalin who came into power in 1941.

There were no weapons used in the Cold War, but there were many created. One of the weapons America developed was the B53 bomb. The B53 bomb was 12 feet in length and weighed 8,500 lbs. The U.S. constructed 340 of these bombs that were capable of a 50 Megaton Blast, 600 times more powerful than the little boy dropped on Hiroshima. The USSR’s equivalent of the B53 bomb was the Tsar Bomb. The Tsar Bomb weighed 60,000 lbs and was 28 feet in length. It was capable of creating a fireball 5 miles in diameter and a mushroom cloud 34.8 miles high. The blast of a Tsar Bomb would unleash 418,400,000,000,000,000 (Four Hundred and Eighteen Quadrillion, Four Hundred Trillion) Joules of energy. A smaller weapon made by America was the Davy Crockett. It was operated by a three man team and was capable of launching a M338 Nuclear Projectile up to two and a half miles. The M338 Nuclear Projectile was able to deliver a fatal dose of radiation up to a quarter mile away.

The stakes of the outcome of the Cold War were without a doubt the most important of any war to date. The gains for each country was becoming the world's superpower and spreading communism or democracy to the world. If the weapons developed would have been used with their intended purposes the world would have been unlike anything we can conceive of.

Bibliography

“History Learning Site,” last accessed January 8, 2013, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk.
“History.com,” last accessed January 8, 2013, http://www.history.com.
“Cold War Museum,” last accessed January 8, 2013, http://www.coldwar.org.