ON THE CUSP OF WORLD WAR III - Q&A WITH ROGER HERMISTON

In 1953 the US and Soviet Union became capable of mutually assured destruction. Soon after, safeguards were put into place in an attempt to prevent it

- ROGER HERMISTON

What nuclear capabilities did the West and the USSR respectively reach in 1953 that made that year so significant?

It was the year when the world moved a dangerous step forward from the atom bomb to the new terrifying ‘superbomb’ – a thermonuclear explosive, based on hydrogen fusion, up to a thousand times more destructive than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Americans had produced their prototype H-bomb – codenamed Ivy Mike – in November 1952; now the Russians successfully tested their own, codenamed Joe-4, in August 1953. As a result the Doomsday Clock, that measurement of how close the world is to Armageddon, was moved to two minutes to midnight (the closest it had been in seven years of Cold War).

How much did both the White House and the Kremlin know about the other’s nuclear capabilities at this time?

Not a huge amount – nowhere remotely what they know today. The Soviets had been well-informed about the American atom bomb by their Western agents, especially Klaus Fuchs, but by 1953 nearly all of them had been uncovered and arrested. As for the West, when the Iron Curtain came down in 1947 it made it very difficult for their spies to penetrate the Kremlin. It was certainly a surprise to President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration when Georgy Malenkov, the new Russian leader, announced to the Supreme Soviet that his country now had the H-bomb.