So Much for Arms Control

On this day in 1949, the U.S. announced--it made the top of the NYT--that it had detected the first Soviet atomic explosion several weeks earlier, see photo at left, which the Soviets thought they'd kept secret.    (Here's how we did it.)  So now the arms race was really.   Truman's refusal to compete with the Soviets rather than cooperate on control of the atom--as the scientists and others suggested--did not keep them from their own weapon, and then the H-bombs (their agents in the U.S. helped that along).   Meanwhile, as I explore in my Atomic Cover-up book,  the U.S. kept the American public largely in the dark on the key aspects of the effects of the bomb, and longterm dangers...