Risk of Nuclear Weapons

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1 : INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS

PART 2 : RISK ISSUE ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS STRIKE

PART 3 : MANNER TO MITIGATE NUCLEAR EFFECTS

PART 4 : RECOMMENDATION

PART 1 : INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS

In 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned of developments in Nazi Germany and urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to begin a research program on nuclear fission for military use. The Manhattan Project was established in 1941 to develop, produce, and test the first "atomic bombs," and J. Robert Oppenheimer was appointed director. On July 16, 1945, the first "atomic bomb" was tested at Alamogordo, NM, and on August 6 and 9 of the same year, US military aircraft dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. These bombs, based on nuclear fission, each had an explosive power equivalent to about 20000 tons (20 kilotons) of TNT. Together, they caused the immediate deaths of approximately 200000 people and the subsequent deaths of thousands more from blast and thermal injuries, radiation sickness, and malignancies.

Despite opposition by Oppenheimer and other physicists, President Harry Truman ordered development work on bombs based on nuclear fusion-termed "thermonuclear weapons," "hydrogen bombs," or "H-bombs"-in 1951. The work was performed under the direction of Edward Teller, who had urged the development of a fusion weapon while working on the Manhattan Project. The first hydrogen bomb test took place in 1952 at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The blast had an explosive power equivalent to 10400000 tons (10.4 megatons) of TNT-500 times greater than the power of each of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1953, the Soviet Union, which had exploded its first fission bomb in 1949, exploded its first fusion bomb. In 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a fusion bomb with a yield equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT-over 2000 times greater than the yield of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and greater than the total...