1949
“The cold war would become the great engine, the supreme catalyst, that sent rockets and their cargoes far above Earth and worlds away.” —William Burrows, This New Ocean
On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 AM in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Atomic Age began in a blazing nuclear fireball, unleashing 18.6 kilotons of radioactive power. A blinding flash of light—brighter than a dozen suns—lit up the sky, and a shock wave of searing heat burst forth, obliterating everything within its radius for miles. A column of debris bloomed into an ominous mushroom cloud of fallout particles.
A nuclear explosion detonates at a test site.
J. Robert Oppenheimer gasped in awe, “It worked.”
Throughout World War II, America’s atomic bomb had been developed in a secret operation known as the Manhattan Project. But its classified status didn’t stop Soviet Union spies from infiltrating project facilities and stealing enough schematics to build and test its own nuclear weapon in 1949. The Soviets’ getting nuclear weapons was a turning point in history. For the first time, the fate of humanity was at the mercy of two diametrically opposed superpowers with doomsday weapons.
After World War II, both the United States—a capitalist democracy—and the Soviet Union—a communist dictatorship—jockeyed to be the most powerful nation in the world. The Cold War (so called because no actual bullets were fired) that followed was an intense political conflict between the two countries, each flexing their guns in a desperate, paranoia-fueled arms race to build bigger and bigger bombs to prove their ideology was the best.
Militaries quickly began stockpiling as many nukes as they could manage. Atomic bombs were one thing, but nuclear weapons attached to rockets like the V-2 that could travel hundreds of miles through the air—having that kind of technology changed the game. Both the United States and the USSR (another name for the Soviet Union) immediately began pouring all their resources into rocket research in hopes of building bigger, better, and longer-range nuclear missiles.
As the Cold War heated up, Wernher von Braun got back to work, this time for the US government. Although von Braun wanted to achieve the means for space exploration, he once again found himself building weapons. The US research team, led by von Braun, successfully test-fired its first V-2 in White Sands, New Mexico, on June 28, 1946.
Still, von Braun and his team weren’t without their fair share of failures, too. Out of 75 tests, 30 failed. One of the most embarrassing incidents occurred on May 29, 1947, at the White Sands test site. A malfunction caused the Hermes II prototype to lose control four seconds after launch. The Hermes rocket flew wildly off course before crash-landing south of the border—in Mexico! The 4½-ton missile created a 50-foot-wide, 24-foot-deep crater on impact. Luckily, no one was hurt, and Mexico was understanding about the mistake.
Meanwhile, Soviet scientists began to develop their own long-range-missile program.
