71 years have passed since the decision behind the construction of the “weapon of the apocalypse”

“The highest officials of the main NATO countries are allowed aggressive statements against our country. For this reason, I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff to put the containment forces of the Russian Army under special service regime”.

These are the words that the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, pronounced on February 27. With them, the “russian containment forces“were on alert… ready to give an answer “quick as lightning” before any attempt of intervention in Ukrainian territory, by any NATO country. But -above all- they are the words with which he returned to bring to the fore the threat of a possible nuclear apocalypse… an issue that had been practically forgotten after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and -consequently- of the end of the Cold War. Sadly, the cruel geopolitical dispute has once again pitted two blocs with potential for destruction whose consequences are difficult to quantify.

For now, the tensions have been limited only to the field of diplomacy. But if any of the parties pass into the hands, an escalation of violence would be unleashed that would have no ceiling… literally. We are talking about the fact that -in the event of a nuclear conflict- an enormous number of weapons of mass destruction could be launched, whose devastating power would turn the fat man Yet the little boy in a petty prank.

Right now they are ready to launch bombs that are 3,000 times more powerful than those of 1945. What has changed since then has been the development of the “fusion bomb” or “Hydrogen bomb”. For now, no country has had the audacity to use one of these artifacts. But Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel they could do it.

The decision behind the apocalypse

The decision that made talk of “apocalypse” was no longer just a figure of speechtook the May 12, 1951. And who took it was Harry S. Trumanthirty-third president of the United States… the same one who gave the green light to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the japanese surrender and from the end of the WWIIthe Soviet Union began its own research program to acquire an atomic bomb like the ones the United States had just dropped. in 1950the Soviets finally got it: they dropped their first fission bomb. That alerted the US president, who understood that he was no longer “the only rooster in the pen.” I couldn’t allow it.

On May 12, 1951, President Truman authorized physicist Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to develop the first hydrogen bomb. Although -in reality- they were not the thinking head of that project. In 2001, the newspaper “New York Times” published a posthumous video of Edward Teller, in which he claimed that The first design of the Hydrogen bomb was due to Richard Garwin, a young 23-year-old physicist who -at that time- was doing internships at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In this way, the green light was given to the construction of an explosive device based on the nuclear fusion, instead of fission of the first weapons of mass destruction. Essentially, what distinguishes one device from another, is that the explosion of a fission bomb is produced by the division of complex atoms into simpler ones; while the meltdown bomb explosion does the exact opposite i.e. combine small atoms to form larger ones.

And it is also known as the name of “hydrogen bomb” either “h-bomb” -precisely- because they are based on the union of deuterium and tritium, which are the components of hydrogen. This process of bonding atoms release much more energy and more radioactive particles. In fact, to activate a fusion bomb, the explosion of a fission bomb is necessary. contained within.

Finally, on November 1, 1952, a blinding explosion lit up the skies of the South Pacific. The United States had launched “Mike”, the first hydrogen fusion device and the prototype for the deadliest H-bombs to come after it. That explosion reached a power of 10.4 megatons, that is, 700 times the power of the “little boy” that fell on Hiroshima.

The force of the impact was such that in the center of the explosion 15 million degrees were reached, which is the estimated temperature of the Sun’s core, dooming the local flora and fauna in perpetuity. The saddest part of all this is that -in reality- the technology behind “Mike” was very conservative…it was simply a proof of “concept”.