Aug 292009
Exactly 60 years ago, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded their first nuclear bomb in the Semipalatinsk test field located in present-day Kazakhstan. The nuclear cold war began. Some forty years later, the cold war supposedly ended, but the vast nuclear arsenals are still there, ready to be deployed on a moment’s notice… so I am not sure what, if anything, has changed in the last 20 years other than the fact that the weapons systems are now older and less reliable… which is not exactly reassuring.