Nuclear Hit Parade

(While writing a series of upcoming blogposts on a tangentially related topic, I needed to mention how the modern nuclear balance plays into things.  This took me too off far from my original topic, so in conjunction with the recent release of Oppenheimer, I’ve decided to post it here separately so I can link back to it later.)

Nine countries possess weapons to protect them from other countries with nuclear weapons:

• The US and the UK vs Germany (suspected)

• Russia vs the US, the UK, and France

• China vs Russia

• India vs China

• Pakistan vs India

• Pakistan vs Israel

• North Korea vs the US, Russia, and China

• Israel vs a second Holocaust

In the days before World War Two, all the major powers had nuclear research programs to varying degrees: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK, the US.

Italy and Japan’s programs each basically consisted of a handful of university professors who would meet occasionally and spitball ideas; these were either formally shut down or saw their budgets slashed when the war started.

France had something similar which the Germans shut down when they overran the country.

Russia’s was also small and got pushed to a back burner when the war started, but they never stopped research and even without espionage data from the US, they would have figured out how to make a nuclear weapon.

The UK, rather than shut their program down entirely at the start of hostilities, merged their efforts with the Americans in the Manhattan Project.

The US knew the Germans were researching nuclear energy and rather than run the risk of coming in second in a nuclear arms race, they threw an ungodly amount of money into the project and built a handful of weapons they intended to drop on Germany.

Germany did indeed have a nuclear energy program, but apparently* they intended it for nuclear energy, not weapons and spent only a fraction of what America did on the Manhattan Project.

The UK and the US, not wanting to take any chances, plunged into the Manhattan Project and developed the first operational nuclear weapon in four years time…

…only Hitler squandered Germany’s remaining reserves in the futile Battle of the Bulge, bringing the European portion of the war to a halt in May of 1945.

Well, no matter; Japan was having a hard time deciding if it wanted to surrender or not and so rather than invade (or worse, let the Russians invade and take Japan), we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

. . .

Now let’s look at things from a Russian perspective:

The Western powers demonstrated nothing by naked contempt and hostility towards the Soviet government since it became clear they would take power.  Europe and the US sided with the Soviet’s enemies during the Russian Civil War, going as far as to launch small scale invasions of the country.  Afterwards the governments of the West opposed them at every turn, trying to force their collapse.

The Germans invading in hopes of conquering Ukraine temporarily forced the Russians into military alliances with Western Europe and the US, with Russia taking the brunt of the casualties and doing all the fighting on the eastern front.

The Soviet leader, Stalin, was a ruthless paranoiac but he could read history books as well as anyone and, anticipating a return to the West’s aggressive anti-Soviet stance after the war, moved first with a series of political and military actions that established the infamous Iron Curtain.

As noted, while scaled back the Russian nuclear research program never actually shut down.  By 1949 they developed and tested their first nuclear device, and at that point the nuclear arms race was on in earnest.**

This spurred American allies to develop their own homegrown nuclear weapons as extra added deterrence against Russian aggression (y’know, just in case some idiot failed real estate con man should get in the White House).  Right now over ten thousand warheads in the two biggest nuclear weapons arsenals -- the US and Russia’s -- are primarily pointed at each other with about four hundred French and English weapons added to the mix under the MAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction, certainly one of the most apt acronyms ever).

. . .

Almost two decades after the US tested their first atomic bomb, China set off their own.

While the US and Russia’s nuclear strategies are based on an aggressive atomic slugfest, China is more interested in nuclear weapons as a deterrence.

While once allied with Russia, China has vacillated back and forth in their relations with them, occasionally enduring border skirmishes, other times embracing one another fondly.  Their 400+ nuclear weapons seem primarily intended to dissuade any Russian invasions though they’d probably be delighted to use them against any American force attempting to invade them.

. . .

While China originally saw Russia as their primary threat because of their close proximity to the north, they also share a long history of skirmishes and border incursions with India to the south. 

This does not make India feel comfortable about their neighbor to the north’s nuclear stockpile, hence the rapid development of their own nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to any Chinese aggression.

Their first test bomb was code named Smiling Buddha which is just about as big an F.U. as they could come up with.

. . .

But just as India developed nuclear bombs in response to China’s arsenal, their long rime rival / quasi-ally / occasional enemy Pakistan felt a corresponding need for a nuclear umbrella in response.  While intended as a deterrence against India, the rest of the world – in particular Israel – wonders what might happen if a more volatile government takes over.

. . .

North Korea also packs a nuclear deterrence punch, but for all their bellicose saber rattling, their stockpile is intended primarily to keep the US and South Korea out as well as deter China and Russia from any aggression on the Korean peninsula. 

. . .

That leaves Israel.  While they faced no nuclear armed enemies at the start of their program, now they need to acknowledge the possibility of a Pakistani threat, not to mention another Middle Eastern country such as Iran or Iraq getting their hands on such a weapon (Turkey, realizing any full on US vs Russia nuke war will be disastrous from them, doesn’t seem inclined to join the nuclear club; the same can’t be said of other countries in the region).

They are mostly deterrence against direct large scale military invasion, but they are probably also capable of lobbing into…oh, I dunno…Russian or Saudi territory should they feel the need arise.

. . .

This is the world Oppenheimer left us.  On the one hand, the possibility of nuclear confrontation probably prevented any direct conflicts among the major superpowers for almost three generations. 

The result of that peace has been the stability of Europe -- no small feat in and of itself! -- and the creation of the European Union, which enables an enormous amount of trade not just there but around the world.

But it hasn’t prevented scores of wars by proxies among nations aligned with one power or another, nor has it prevented the major powers from engaging in foolish military adventures that played out badly for them.

The world stays stable only so long as it seems stable.

[If you’re a fan of the work of Rich Corben and / or Jim Stenstrum, you might enjoy Hard John’s Nuclear Hit Parade at the Internet Archive.  Bonus art by Jose Ortiz and John Severin.]

© Buzz Dixon

* “Apparently” because much of the German’s nuclear research is sealed in top secret files not to be released until after 2045, tantalizing albeit dubious rumors the Germans actually did test a small nuclear device, and in one of the research papers not scooped up by the OSS there’s a doodle in the margins that sure looks like somebody’s basic design idea of an atomic bomb.

** Knowing it would be difficult-bordering-impossible to send bomber fleets deep into US territory while America could strike them from airbases in Alaska and Europe, the Russians moved forward aggressively with their long-range rocket program, leading to Sputnik and the Space Race.