Reeling Back

Today (August 29) in 1949 was one of those days on which the world changed forever. It happened at a place called Semipalatinsk in north-east Kazakhstan, where the earth shook as the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. The test, code-named First Lightning, put an end to the nuclear monopoly the United States had enjoyed since July 16, 1945. It was less than a month after that first test in the New Mexico desert that the U.S. demonstrated the power of its new weapon by incinerating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). Four years later, editorial writers introduced the term "arms race" to their readers. Not to be left behind, former "Great Powers" Britain and France set out to develop their own nuclear arsenals, with the U.K. joining the club in 1952 and France in 1960. When China tested its own bomb in 1964, satirist Tom Lehrer noted that "proliferation" had become "the word of the day" and responded with a song called Who's Next?. India, as it turned out, made use of its Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor to build the bomb it set off in 1974, which prompted its neighbour Pakistan to go nuclear in the mid-1980s. North Korea made much of its October 2006 A-bomb test. By contrast, Israel keeps very quiet about its nukes, a stockpile that's been growing since the late 1960s. In the alternate universe envisioned by director James Cameron, today (August 29) is the day in 1997 that the machines rose up against us, an event at the centre of his Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).