Nuclear Weapons And The United States
The United States was the first country to develop nuclear weapons, and is the only country to have used them in warfare, with the separate bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Before and during the Cold War it conducted over a thousand nuclear tests and developed many long-range weapon delivery systems.
Until November 1962, the vast majority of the U.S. tests were above-ground; after the acceptance of the Partial Test Ban Treaty all testing was regulated underground, in order to prevent the dispersion of nuclear fallout. Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. spent at least $8.63 trillion in present day terms on nuclear weapons development. As of February 2006, over $1.2 billion in compensation was paid to U.S. citizens exposed to nuclear hazards as a result of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and by 1998 at least $759 million was paid to the Marshallese Islanders in compensation for their exposure to U.S. nuclear testing.
In 2010 the United States maintained an arsenal of 5,113 warheads and facilities for their construction and design, though many of the Cold War facilities have since been deactivated and are sites for environmental remediation.
Read more about Nuclear Weapons And The United States: Nuclear Weapons Testing, Delivery Systems, Accidents, Development Agencies, Weapons Production Complex, Proliferation, International Relations and Nuclear Weapons, Occupational Illness, Status As of 2006, Current Status, United States Strategic Nuclear Weapons Arsenal
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“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“The problems of the world, AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution, are, finally, no more solvable than the problem of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and they are falling—what can be done?... Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being done—the organism is preparing to rest.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“I incline to think that the people will not now sustain the policy of upholding a State Government against a rival government, by the use of the forces of the United States. If this leads to the overthrow of the de jure government in a State, the de facto government must be recognized.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The traveler to the United States will do well ... to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)