Missile delivery systems, replacing manned bombers, meant that these weapons were now far easier to deploy. A single A-bomb would kill perhaps fifty thousand people a single H-bomb could completely destroy a city the size of Birmingham. Churchill said that the A-bomb was not ‘unmanageable as an instrument of war’, but that the H-bomb ‘carries us into dimensions which have never confronted practical human thought’. The atomic bomb worked through nuclear fission, splitting the atom to release a huge blast of energy the hydrogen bomb used fusion – forcing two atoms into a single new atom – as well as fission to produce a blast many times more powerful. The United States had recently tested its first H-bomb, and the Soviet Union was working on its own version. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war. I n 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK.
0 kommentar(er)
