HUMA 2740 Lecture Notes - Lecture 93: Cuban Missile Crisis, Mutual Assured Destruction
7 May 2018
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HUMA 2740
Lecture 93
The Arms Race
- Largest army buildup in world history as US and USSR undertook to
make sure that they wouldn’t be unprepared for a potential conflict
- Development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons
- The USSR detonated its first atom bomb in 1949, four years after the
US had demonstrated them to the world in Japan
- Americans and Russians also developed sophisticated delivery
systems to get them to their enemy
- Both developed Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs = rocket
based systems capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere in
the world)
- Developed fleets of long-range bombers capable of flying around the
world to deliver the bombs
- Developed nuclear submarines that could go undetected anywhere in
world and could fire long-range nuclear-tipped missiles
- Last innovation was a component of “Policy of Deterrence” – idea
was to convince each other that neither could prevail in a nuclear
confrontation
- If one attacked another and destroyed that other country, loser would
still be able to unleash nuclear weapons from submarines and its
foreign-based bombers or missiles housed in other countries
o “Mutual Assured Destruction” (M.A.D.)
- Both constructed large quantities of conventional weapons: tanks,
armored vehicles, etc.
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