On January 31st, 1950, President Harry S. Truman publicly announced his decision to support the development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Truman called it the “superbomb” in his public announcement. His decision was driven by the discovery that Klaus Fuchs, a top-ranking scientist in the U.S. nuclear program was a spy for the Soviet Union and that the Soviet likely knew everything the U.S. did about building a hydrogen bomb.
Notes for Sunday – January 31, 2016
