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The Cold War: World War III That Never Took Place
On July 16, 1945, Trinity, the code name of the first nuclear weapon, was detonated by
the United States Army initiating the dawn of the “atomic age.” The United States retaliated
against Japan’s refusal to surrender during World War II by dropping two atom bombs on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the successful test explosion of Trinity.
Photographs of the desolated Japanese cities were released shortly after the end of World War II
and became symbols of the power of the new weapons. Historian Spencer R. Weart called
nuclear weapons a “symbol for the worst of modernity.” The United States was the monopoly
owner of atomic weapons at the time of Trinity’s detonation and four years thereafter. The
Soviet Union became fearful of its rival, the United States and its newly acquired arsenal, and so
began construction of its own atom bomb. The competitive construction of nuclear weapons
between the United States and the Soviet Union is referred to as the “nuclear arms race” and was
the driving force of the Cold War. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union successfully conducted
its first atomic weapons test, which gave Joseph Stalin the defenses necessary to spread his
communist ideologies as far as possible. Strategic analysts assert that nuclear weapons
prevented the U.S. and the Soviet Union from fighting “World War III” with conventional
weapons (“Nuclear Technology”). Thus, any retaliation from either side would have lead to
catastrophic consequences. The race for building nuclear weapons heightened the turmoil
between the Communist and Capitalist blocs and was the basis for the drastic shift in the United
States’s political focus. The U.S. government’s priority became foreign policy with a goal of
halting the spread of communism. Within the United States this shift in focus from domestic
policy to foreign policy was a major contributing factor to President...