hydrogen bomb tactical nuclear weapons Soviet Union Nagasaki Hiroshima
The American monopoly on nuclear weapons lasted four years before the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in September 1949. The United States responded with the development of the hydrogen bomb, a nuclear weapon a thousand times as powerful as the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ordinary fission bombs would henceforth be regarded as small tactical nuclear weapons. By 1986, the United States had 23,317 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had 40,159. In early 2019, more than 90% of the world's 13,865 nuclear weapons were owned by the United States and Russia.
