August 29, 1949, 75 years ago: The Soviet Union successfully test a device they call RDS-1, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. The United States of American is no longer alone in possessing the atomic bomb. The "Reds" have it now, too.
It was similar to the "Fat Man" bomb that the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki, Japan: A plutonium-based implosion type weapon with an explosive yield equivalent to 22 kilotons of TNT. They had received intelligence on Fat Man thanks to Julius Rosenberg, who had been a U.S. Army engineer. He and his wife Ethel had been couriers for the Communist Party, and would be convicted of treason in 1951 and executed for it in 1953.
The Soviets called it "Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Spetsialnyi," or "Special Jet Engine." "RDS" also worked as "Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina," meaning "Stalin's Jet Engine"; or "Rossiya Delayet Sama," meaning "Russia does it herself." (In contrast with Germany and many other countries calling themselves a "Fatherland," Russia has always been known as a "Motherland," or as "Mother Russia.")
Now, the Soviet Union had not just the world's 2nd-biggest military force, it had the bomb. If the Cold War was not yet well and truly on, it was now.
There are those who say that the Soviet Union was a more evil regime than Nazi Germany. The Soviets had the bomb for 42 years before their regime collapsed, and they never used it. If Hitler had the bomb, would he have hesitated to use it on Moscow? On London? If he could have loaded one onto a plane aboard their only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, and sent a bomb to New York or Washington, would he have ordered it? It was Hitler. Of course he would have.
But he never got close. Partly because the Allies took action, and partly because Hitler chased his own best scientists into the arms of the Allies.
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