Nuclear Proliferation and Disarmament

Nuclear Proliferation and disarmament

A hundred years ago, it was beyond the wildest dreams of even the greatest of scientists to build a weapon so powerful, capable of literally obliterating everything within miles and killing people thousands of miles away. This once-thought impossible idea has rapidly turned into a reality when the United States dropped two bombs, capable of destruction the world has never seen before, one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki, signifying the start of the atomic age. After that, global security was at an all-time low and it was in the interest of almost everyone for a stop to nuclear proliferation and a gradual disarmament, especially for the two superpowers of the time.

On August 2, 1939, weeks before the start of World War two, world renowned scientist and Nobel prize winner Albert Einstein and several other scientists wrote a letter to then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the efforts in Nazi Germany to purify Uranium-235 which could be used to build a bomb so powerful that it could single-handedly wipe out entire cities. Roosevelt, fearing that Hitler would get his hands first on the weapon, authorized a large scale research and development project known as the Manhattan Project, spending over two billion dollars ($26B today) over six years to produce atomic bombs for war efforts. In 1945, the project successfully tested the world’s first nuclear device at the Trinity Test in New Mexico. Not three weeks later, the world changed. Tens of thousands of people were killed instantly and thousands more through excessive radioactive intake when the US dropped the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the first and only time in history where a nuclear weapon was ever used in actual warfare. It was also the first time the world has ever witnessed the horrors of radioactive poisoning. About 155,000 people lost their lives to the atomic bomb (Lengel, 2013).

After the controversial usage of the atomic bomb...