Post by SolomonWPost by Andrew SwallowPost by SolomonWI have heard this story before, I am not so sure it happened the offical
position of the USSR at that time was that nuclear bombs changed little.
Possibly the destruction of Dresden was a sufficient deterrent. Those
weak and degenerate capitalists could kill.
The atomic bombing of Japan would be a better example to them.
Also, Stalin could only guess if the bomb had gone into serial production,
like the nonexistent "sausages" Nikita Khrushchev would boast about years
later. The notion of A-bombs coming off an assembly line must've caused him
more than a few sleepless nights.
And he had good reason to be worried. Just two weeks after the Japanese
surrender, General Leslie Groves was handed a document identifying for
possible future atomic attack fifteen "key Soviet cities," headed by Moscow,
and twenty-five "leading Soviet cities," including Leningrad, and specifying
the number of atomic bombs needed to destroy each (Moscow and Leningrad
would require six apiece).
Trouble was, the U.S. didn't have six A-bombs in 1945. A year after Trinity,
there were a total of nine bombs in the inventory (two were used in the
Bikini tests). The first official war plan in 1947 called for hitting
twenty-four Soviet cities with thirty-four bombs, but there were only
thirteen bombs in the U.S. arsenal, and only seven were complete weapons.
The war planners didn't know that because it was super-secret. When
President Harry Truman found out he was outraged that it was so small.
Until 1948 all the weapons were "hand-tooled," considered as "laboratory
weapons." The scarcity of fissionable material prompted an international
search for high-grade uranium.
Check out the "handy-dandy" targets charts: https://tinyurl.com/y78sgjeb
(That's it, blame it ALL on those nasty-ass Americans).
Mao quickly faced intense hostility from the West, particularly the United
States, which threatened nuclear strikes against China. After North Korea
invaded South Korea in June 1950, Washington intervened in support of the
South, while Beijing fought in support of the North. President Harry S.
Truman subsequently ordered ten nuclear-armed B-29s to the Pacific fleet as
his government seriously considered a nuclear strike. One proponent of
nuclear action, General Curtis LeMay, argued in 1954, “I would drop a few
bombs in proper places like China, Manchuria and Southeastern Russia. In
those ‘poker games,’ such as Korea and Indo-China, we... have never raised
the ante -- we have always just called the bet. We ought to try raising
sometime.”