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Most Japanese military units fought fiercely, ensuring that the Allied victory would come at an enormous cost. The 1.25 million battle casualties incurred in total by the United States in World War II included both military personnel killed in action and wounded in action. Nearly one million of the casualties occurred during the last year of ...
South Africa successfully built six nuclear weapons in the 1980s, but dismantled all of them in the early 1990s, shortly before the fall of the apartheid system. [23] So far it is the only nuclear-capable country to give up nuclear weapons, although several members of the Soviet Union did so during the collapse of the Soviet regime. North Korea ...
The aftermath of World War II saw the rise of two global superpowers, the United States (U.S.) and the Soviet Union (USSR). The aftermath of World War II was also defined by the rising threat of nuclear warfare, the creation and implementation of the United Nations as an intergovernmental organization, and the decolonization of Asia, Oceania, South America and Africa by European and East Asian ...
US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2014. The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon ("RDS-1") in 1949. This crash project was developed partially with information obtained via the atomic spies at the United States' Manhattan Project during and after World War II. The Soviet Union was the second nation to have developed ...
The United States opened the nuclear era in July 1945 with the test of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945, and then dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese c
Limited attacks are thought to be a more credible response against attacks that do not justify all-out retaliation, such as an enemy's limited use of nuclear weapons. [23] The second, a full-scale nuclear war, could consist of large numbers of nuclear weapons used in an attack aimed at an entire country, including military, economic, and ...
France had been heavily involved in nuclear research before World War II through the work of the Joliot-Curies. This was discontinued after the war because of the instability of the Fourth Republic and lack of finances. [76] However, in the 1950s, France launched a civil nuclear research program, which produced plutonium as a byproduct.
During World War II, Japan had several programs exploring the use of nuclear fission for military technology, including nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.Like the similar wartime programs in Nazi Germany, it was relatively small, suffered from an array of problems brought on by lack of resources and wartime disarray, and was ultimately unable to progress beyond the laboratory stage during ...