Nuclear arms race

The Cold War competition, led by the United States and Soviet Union, to build, improve, and deploy nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Nuclear deterrence: A strategy that seeks to prevent an attack by threatening unacceptable retaliation. Each side expanded its arsenal partly to make a nuclear attack appear unwinnable.
Manhattan Project: The United States-led wartime program that developed the first atomic bombs. Its success gave the United States an initial nuclear monopoly after World War II.
Cuban Missile Crisis: The 1962 confrontation over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba that brought the superpowers close to war. It exposed how an arms race could turn deployments and misread signals into an acute crisis.
Nuclear proliferation: The spread of nuclear weapons, materials, or weapons-related capabilities to additional states or actors. The arms race centered on two superpowers, while proliferation concerns the wider spread of nuclear capability.
Mutual assured destruction: A deterrence condition in which both adversaries can inflict devastating retaliation after a first strike. Survivable second-strike forces made the arms race a contest over guaranteed retaliation.
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The August 1945 U.S. attacks that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. The bombings demonstrated nuclear weapons' destructive power before the Soviet arsenal emerged.
Nuclear winter: A hypothesized global cooling caused by soot from widespread nuclear-fire smoke blocking sunlight. Research on nuclear winter highlighted planetary consequences beyond blast and radiation.
Nuclear disarmament: The reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons through unilateral action, negotiation, or other measures. Disarmament seeks to reverse the accumulation that defined the arms race.
Intercontinental ballistic missile: A ballistic missile designed to travel between continents and deliver a payload over long distances. ICBMs made rapid attacks across oceans a central measure of strategic capability.
Soviet atomic bomb project: The Soviet program that produced the first Soviet atomic bomb, tested in 1949. The Soviet test ended the U.S. nuclear monopoly and accelerated weapons competition.

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