Overkill

From Audcwiki, the free encyclopedia.

The Bomb was the Cold War’s defining weapon. Beyond its brute firepower, the Bomb possessed the singular ability to erase an enemy. While burning had been a common means of disposing of humans since prehistory, vaporizing them so that nothing would be left behind was unprecedented. At Hiroshima, for the first time, people were transformed into pure energy, leaving only an occasional shadow recording the force of the blast behind. After the Bomb, matter’s permanence would no longer be assured.

Even the threat of erasure was exceeded during the frenzy of cold war proliferation. The threat of the Bomb became more destructive as its megatonnage was continuously increased and its quantity was produced in greater numbers assuring not only destruction, but overkill, the ability to repeatedly erase a target after its elimination is already assured. By the end of the Kennedy administration, both superpowers had amassed enough nuclear weapons to reach beyond overkill to achieve Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a guarantee that the surplus of nuclear exchange would not only erase strategic targets, but thoroughly destroy both sides many times over. By the 1970s it was rumored that the Soviet Union had deployed a Cobalt Bomb in East Berlin, a doomsday weapon capable of extinguishing all life on earth. In the final stage of the Cold War the development of a Neutron Bomb made it possible to preserve urban objects and infrastructure while killing more people. The massive buildup of the Bomb, easily the most expensive undertaking in human history, was a proliferation of objects precisely at the time when they became obsolete.

Throughout the Cold War, both sides developed computers in order to control their nuclear stockpiles and to wage simulations of nuclear battles. The lions share of actual destruction incurred on US and Soviet soil occured through nuclear testing, not nuclear warfare. Between the years of 1951-1962 the US government alone dropped atomic bombs on New Mexico, Nevada, and the Bikini Islands, sending enourmous amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and local environment. With a computer, the destructive potential of the warheads could be measured on a larger scale and adjusted without necessarily detonating warheads on a country's own soil. Militaries came to rely on the results of these tests as not just “scenario plans” but as victories and defeats themselves. The results justified the continued expansion of nuclear programs: a defeat in the computer was necessary to argue for funds that would allow real tactical superiority.

Fictions and plausible truths regarding the strength of the enemy became more valuable than actual figures that could be verified. Both the bomber gap and missile gap between the superpowers were falsified by the Soviets but were endorsed by the US military. Recent research even suggests that the United States could have launched a satellite prior to Sputnik – we did, after all, have Von Braun – but it was to our advantage to be defeated. By losing that round of the space race, the US could claim the necessity of escalating proliferation to unprecedented levels.

next: Material Culture