document_title: History of nuclear weapons

question_text: when did the development of nuclear science begin

question_tokens: when did the development of nuclear science begin

text: History of nuclear weapons

text: Physics and politics in the 1930s and 1940s[edit]

text: In the first decades of the 20th century, physics was revolutionised with developments in the understanding of the nature of atoms. In 1898, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered that pitchblende, an ore of uranium, contained a substance—which they named radium—that emitted large amounts of radioactivity. Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy identified that atoms were breaking down and turning into different elements. Hopes were raised among scientists and laymen that the elements around us could contain tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be harnessed.

text:
H. G. Wells was inspired to write about atomic weapons in a 1914 novel, The World Set Free, which appeared shortly before the First World War.
In a 1924 article, Winston Churchill speculated about the possible military implications: "Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?"[1]

text:
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and it quickly became unsafe for Jewish scientists to remain in the country. Leó Szilárd fled to London where he proposed, and in 1934 patented, the idea of a nuclear chain reaction via neutrons. The patent also introduced the term critical mass to describe the minimum amount of material required to sustain the chain reaction and its potential to cause an explosion. (British patent 630,726.) He subsequently assigned the patent to the British Admiralty so that it could be covered by the Official Secrets Act.[2] In a very real sense, Szilárd was the father of the atomic bomb academically.
Also in 1934, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered that artificial radioactivity could be induced in stable elements by bombarding them with alpha particles; Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons.

text:
In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons.[3] Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted these results as being due to the splitting of the uranium atom. (Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939.[4]) They gave the process the name "fission" because of its similarity to the splitting of a cell into two new cells.[5]
Even before it was published, news of Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation crossed the Atlantic.[6]
Scientists at Columbia University decided to replicate the experiment and on January 25, 1939, conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States[7] in the basement of Pupin Hall.[8] The following year, they identified the active component of uranium as being the rare isotope uranium-235.[9]

text: Uranium appears in nature primarily in two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. When the nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it undergoes nuclear fission, releasing energy and, on average, 2.5 neutrons. Because uranium-235 releases more neutrons than it absorbs, it can support a chain reaction and so is described as fissile. Uranium-238, on the other hand, is not fissile as it does not normally undergo fission when it absorbs a neutron.

text:
By the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, many of Europe's top scientists had already fled the imminent conflict. Physicists on both sides were well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but no one was quite sure how it could be done.
In August 1939, concerned that Germany might have its own project to develop fission-based weapons, Albert Einstein signed a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the threat.[10] Roosevelt responded by setting up the Uranium Committee under Lyman James Briggs but, with little initial funding ($6,000), progress was slow. It was not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, that the U.S. decided to commit the necessary resources.[11]

text: Organized research first began in Britain as part of the Tube Alloys project. The Maud Committee was set up following the work of Frisch and Rudolf Peierls who calculated uranium-235's critical mass and found it to be much smaller than previously thought which meant that a deliverable bomb should be possible.[12] In the February 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum they stated that: "The energy liberated in the explosion of such a super-bomb...will, for an instant, produce a temperature comparable to that of the interior of the sun. The blast from such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area. The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it will probably cover the centre of a big city."

text: Edgar Sengier, a director of Shinkolobwe Mine in the Congo which produced by far the highest quality uranium ore in the world, had become aware of uranium's possible use in a bomb. In late 1940, fearing that it might be seized by the Germans, he shipped the mine's entire stockpile of ore to a warehouse on Staten Island.[13]

text: For 18 months British research outpaced the American but by mid-1942, it became apparent that the industrial effort required was beyond Britain's already stretched wartime economy.[14]:204 In September 1942, General Leslie Groves was appointed to lead the U.S. project which became known as the Manhattan Project. Two of his first acts were to obtain authorization to assign the highest priority AAA rating on necessary procurements, and to order the purchase of all 1,250 tons of the Shinkolobwe ore.[13][15] The Tube Alloys project was quickly overtaken by the U.S. effort[14] and after Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Quebec Agreement in 1943, it was relocated and amalgamated into the Manhattan Project.

text: From Los Alamos to Hiroshima[edit]

text: With a scientific team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan project brought together some of the top scientific minds of the day, including many exiles from Europe, with the production power of American industry for the goal of producing fission-based explosive devices before Germany. Britain and the U.S. agreed to pool their resources and information for the project, but the other Allied power, the Soviet Union (USSR), was not informed. The U.S. made an unprecedented investment in the project which at the time was the largest industrial enterprise ever seen,[14] spread across more than 30 sites in the U.S. and Canada. Scientific development was centralized in a secret laboratory at Los Alamos.

text: For a fission weapon to operate, there must be sufficient fissile material to support a chain reaction, a critical mass. To separate the fissile uranium-235 isotope from the non-fissile uranium-238, two methods were developed which took advantage of the fact that uranium-238 has a slightly greater atomic mass: electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion. Another secret site was erected at rural Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the large-scale production and purification of the rare isotope, which required considerable investment. At the time, K-25, one of the Oak Ridge facilities, was the world's largest factory under one roof. The Oak Ridge site employed tens of thousands of people at its peak, most of whom had no idea what they were working on.

text: Although uranium-238 cannot be used for the initial stage of an atomic bomb, when it absorbs a neutron, it becomes uranium-239 which decays into neptunium-239, and finally the relatively stable plutonium-239, an element that does not exist naturally on Earth, but is fissile like uranium-235. After Fermi achieved the world's first sustained and controlled nuclear chain reaction with the creation of the first atomic pile, massive reactors were secretly constructed at what is now known as Hanford Site to transform uranium-238 into plutonium for a bomb.

text: The simplest form of nuclear weapon is a gun-type fission weapon, where a sub-critical mass would be shot at another sub-critical mass. The result would be a super-critical mass and an uncontrolled chain reaction that would create the desired explosion. The weapons envisaged in 1942 were the two gun-type weapons, Little Boy (uranium) and Thin Man (plutonium), and the Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb.

text: In early 1943 Oppenheimer determined that two projects should proceed forwards: the Thin Man project (plutonium gun) and the Fat Man project (plutonium implosion). The plutonium gun was to receive the bulk of the research effort, as it was the project with the most uncertainty involved. It was assumed that the uranium gun-type bomb could then be adapted from it.

text: In December 1943 the British mission of 19 scientists arrived in Los Alamos.  Hans Bethe became head of the Theoretical Division.

text: In April 1944 it was found by Emilio Segrè that the plutonium-239 produced by the Hanford reactors had too high a level of background neutron radiation, and underwent spontaneous fission to a very small extent, due to the unexpected presence of plutonium-240 impurities. If such plutonium were used in a gun-type design, the chain reaction would start in the split second before the critical mass was fully assembled, blowing the weapon apart with a much lower yield than expected, in what is known as a  fizzle.

text: As a result, development of Fat Man was given high priority. Chemical explosives were used to implode a sub-critical sphere of plutonium, thus increasing its density and making it into a critical mass. The difficulties with implosion centered on the problem of making the chemical explosives deliver a perfectly uniform shock wave upon the plutonium sphere— if it were even slightly asymmetric, the weapon would fizzle. This problem was solved by the use of explosive lenses which would focus the blast waves inside the imploding sphere, akin to the way in which an optical lens focuses light rays.[16]

text: After D-Day, General Groves ordered a team of scientists to follow eastward-moving victorious Allied troops into Europe to assess the status of the German nuclear program (and to prevent the westward-moving Soviets from gaining any materials or scientific manpower). They concluded that, while Germany had an atomic bomb program headed by Werner Heisenberg, the government had not made a significant investment in the project, and it had been nowhere near success.[citation needed] Similarly, Japan's efforts at developing a nuclear weapon were starved of resources. The Japanese navy lost interest when a committee led by Yoshio Nishina concluded in 1943 that "it would probably be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic power during the war".[17]

text: Historians claim to have found a rough schematic showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.[18] In March 1945, a German scientific team was directed by the physicist Kurt Diebner to develop a primitive nuclear device in Ohrdruf, Thuringia.[18][19] Last ditch research was conducted in an experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch.

text: On April 12, after Roosevelt's death, Vice-President Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency. At the time of the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, the Manhattan Project was still months away from producing a working weapon.

text: Because of the difficulties in making a working plutonium bomb, it was decided that there should be a test of the weapon. On July 16, 1945, in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first nuclear test took place, code-named "Trinity", using a device nicknamed "the gadget." The test, a plutonium implosion type device, released energy equivalent to 19 kilotons of TNT, far more powerful than any weapon ever used before. The news of the test's success was rushed to Truman at the Potsdam Conference, where Churchill was briefed and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was informed of the new weapon. On July 26, the Potsdam Declaration was issued containing an ultimatum for Japan: either surrender or suffer "complete and utter destruction", although nuclear weapons were not mentioned.[14]

text: After hearing arguments from scientists and military officers over the possible use of nuclear weapons against Japan (though some recommended using them as demonstrations in unpopulated areas, most recommended using them against built up targets, a euphemistic term for populated cities), Truman ordered the use of the weapons on Japanese cities, hoping it would send a strong message that would end in the capitulation of the Japanese leadership and avoid a lengthy invasion of the islands. On May 10–11, 1945, the Target Committee at Los Alamos, led by Oppenheimer, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura as possible targets. Concerns about Kyoto's cultural heritage led to it being replaced by Nagasaki.

text:
On August 6, 1945, a uranium-based weapon, Little Boy, was detonated above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and three days later, a plutonium-based weapon, Fat Man, was detonated above the Japanese city of Nagasaki. To date, Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only two instances of nuclear weapons being used in combat. The atomic raids killed at least one hundred thousand Japanese civilians and military personnel outright, with the heat, radiation, and blast effects.
Many tens of thousands would later die of radiation sickness and related cancers.[20][21] Truman promised a "rain of ruin" if Japan did not surrender immediately, threatening to systematically eliminate their ability to wage war.[22] On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.[23]

text: Soviet atomic bomb project[edit]

text: The Soviet Union was not invited to share in the new weapons developed by the United States and the other Allies. During the war, information had been pouring in from a number of volunteer spies involved with the Manhattan Project (known in Soviet cables under the code-name of Enormoz), and the Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov was carefully watching the Allied weapons development. It came as no surprise to Stalin when Truman had informed him at the Potsdam conference that he had a "powerful new weapon." Truman was shocked at Stalin's lack of interest.

text: The Soviet spies in the U.S. project were all volunteers and none were Soviet citizens. One of the most valuable, Klaus Fuchs, was a German émigré theoretical physicist who had been part of the early British nuclear efforts and the UK mission to Los Alamos. Fuchs had been intimately involved in the development of the implosion weapon, and passed on detailed cross-sections of the Trinity device to his Soviet contacts. Other Los Alamos spies—none of whom knew each other—included Theodore Hall and David Greenglass. The information was kept but not acted upon, as the Soviet Union was still too busy fighting the war in Europe to devote resources to this new project.

text: In the years immediately after World War II, the issue of who should control atomic weapons became a major international point of contention. Many of the Los Alamos scientists who had built the bomb began to call for "international control of atomic energy," often calling for either control by transnational organizations or the purposeful distribution of weapons information to all superpowers, but due to a deep distrust of the intentions of the Soviet Union, both in postwar Europe and in general, the policy-makers of the United States worked to attempt to secure an American nuclear monopoly.

text: A half-hearted plan for international control was proposed at the newly formed United Nations by Bernard Baruch (The Baruch Plan), but it was clear both to American commentators—and to the Soviets—that it was an attempt primarily to stymie Soviet nuclear efforts. The Soviets vetoed the plan, effectively ending any immediate postwar negotiations on atomic energy, and made overtures towards banning the use of atomic weapons in general.

text: The Soviets had put their full industrial might and manpower into the development of their own atomic weapons. The initial problem for the Soviets was primarily one of resources—they had not scouted out uranium resources in the Soviet Union and the U.S. had made deals to monopolise the largest known (and high purity) reserves in the Belgian Congo. The USSR used penal labour to mine the old deposits in Czechoslovakia—now an area under their control—and searched for other domestic deposits (which were eventually found).

text: Two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, the U.S. government released an official technical history of the Manhattan Project, authored by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, known colloquially as the Smyth Report. The sanitized summary of the wartime effort focused primarily on the production facilities and scale of investment, written in part to justify the wartime expenditure to the American public.

text: The Soviet program, under the suspicious watch of former NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria (a participant and victor in Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s), would use the Report as a blueprint, seeking to duplicate as much as possible the American effort. The "secret cities" used for the Soviet equivalents of Hanford and Oak Ridge literally vanished from the maps for decades to come.

text: At the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, Arzamas-16, physicist Yuli Khariton led the scientific effort to develop the weapon. Beria distrusted his scientists, however, and he distrusted the carefully collected espionage information. As such, Beria assigned multiple teams of scientists to the same task without informing each team of the other's existence. If they arrived at different conclusions, Beria would bring them together for the first time and have them debate with their newfound counterparts. Beria used the espionage information as a way to double-check the progress of his scientists, and in his effort for duplication of the American project even rejected more efficient bomb designs in favor of ones that more closely mimicked the tried-and-true Fat Man bomb used by the U.S. against Nagasaki.

text: Working under a stubborn and scientifically ignorant administrator, the Soviet scientists struggled on. On August 29, 1949, the effort brought its results, when the USSR tested its first fission bomb, dubbed "Joe-1" by the U.S., years ahead of American predictions. The news of the first Soviet bomb was announced to the world first by the United States, which had detected the nuclear fallout it generated from its test site in Kazakhstan.

text: The loss of the American monopoly on nuclear weapons marked the first tit-for-tat of the nuclear arms race. The response in the U.S. was one of apprehension, fear, and scapegoating, which would lead eventually into the Red-baiting tactics of McCarthyism. Yet recent information from unclassified Venona intercepts and the opening of the KGB archives after the fall of the Soviet Union show that the USSR had useful spies that helped their program, although none were identified by McCarthy.[citation needed]  Before this, though, President Truman announced a decision to begin a crash program that would develop a far more powerful weapon than those the U.S. used against Japan: the hydrogen bomb.

text: American developments after World War II[edit]

text: In 1946 Congress established the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to take over the development of nuclear weapons from the military, and to develop nuclear power. The AEC made use of many private companies in processing uranium and thorium and in other urgent tasks related to the development of bombs. Many of these companies had very lax safety measures and employees were sometimes exposed to radiation levels far above what was allowed then or now.[24] In 1974, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) of the Army Corps of Engineers was set up to deal with contaminated sites left over from these operations.[25]

text: The first thermonuclear weapons[edit]

text: The notion of using a fission weapon to ignite a process of nuclear fusion can be dated back to 1942. At the first major theoretical conference on the development of an atomic bomb hosted by J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, participant Edward Teller directed the majority of the discussion towards Enrico Fermi's idea of a "Super" bomb that would use the same reactions that powered the Sun itself.

text: It was thought at the time that a fission weapon would be quite simple to develop and that perhaps work on a hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear weapon) would be possible to complete before the end of the Second World War. However, in reality the problem of a regular atomic bomb was large enough to preoccupy the scientists for the next few years, much less the more speculative "Super" bomb. Only Teller continued working on the project—against the will of project leaders Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe.

text: After the atomic bombings of Japan, many scientists at Los Alamos rebelled against the notion of creating a weapon thousands of times more powerful than the first atomic bombs. For the scientists the question was in part technical—the weapon design was still quite uncertain and unworkable—and in part moral: such a weapon, they argued, could only be used against large civilian populations, and could thus only be used as a weapon of genocide.

text: Many scientists, such as Bethe, urged that the United States should not develop such weapons and set an example towards the Soviet Union. Promoters of the weapon, including Teller, Ernest Lawrence, and Luis Alvarez, argued that such a development was inevitable, and to deny such protection to the people of the United States—especially when the Soviet Union was likely to create such a weapon themselves—was itself an immoral and unwise act.

text: Oppenheimer, who was now head of the General Advisory Committee of the successor to the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, presided over a recommendation against the development of the weapon. The reasons were in part because the success of the technology seemed limited at the time (and not worth the investment of resources to confirm whether this was so), and because Oppenheimer believed that the atomic forces of the United States would be more effective if they consisted of many large fission weapons (of which multiple bombs could be dropped on the same targets) rather than the large and unwieldy super bombs, for which there was a relatively limited number of targets of sufficient size to warrant such a development.

text: What is more, if such weapons were developed by both superpowers, they would be more effective against the U.S. than against the USSR, as the U.S. had far more regions of dense industrial and civilian activity as targets for large weapons than the Soviet Union.

text: In the end, President Truman made the final decision, looking for a proper response to the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. On January 31, 1950, Truman announced a crash program to develop the hydrogen (fusion) bomb. At this point, however, the exact mechanism was still not known: the classical hydrogen bomb, whereby the heat of the fission bomb would be used to ignite the fusion material, seemed highly unworkable. However, an insight by Los Alamos mathematician Stanislaw Ulam showed that the fission bomb and the fusion fuel could be in separate parts of the bomb, and that radiation of the fission bomb could first work in a way to compress the fusion material before igniting it.

text: Teller pushed the notion further, and used the results of the boosted-fission "George" test (a boosted-fission device using a small amount of fusion fuel to boost the yield of a fission bomb) to confirm the fusion of heavy hydrogen elements before preparing for their first true multi-stage, Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb test. Many scientists, initially against the weapon, such as Oppenheimer and Bethe, changed their previous opinions, seeing the development as being unstoppable.

text: The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named "Mike." Mike used liquid deuterium as its fusion fuel and a large fission weapon as its trigger. The device was a prototype design and not a deliverable weapon: standing over 20 ft (6 m) high and weighing at least 140,000 lb (64 t) (its refrigeration equipment added an additional 24,000 lb (11,000 kg) as well), it could not have been dropped from even the largest planes.

text: Its explosion yielded energy equivalent to 10.4 megatons of TNT—over 450 times the power of the bomb dropped onto Nagasaki— and obliterated Elugelab, leaving an underwater crater 6240 ft (1.9 km) wide and 164 ft (50 m) deep where the island had once been. Truman had initially tried to create a media blackout about the test—hoping it would not become an issue in the upcoming presidential election—but on January 7, 1953, Truman announced the development of the hydrogen bomb to the world as hints and speculations of it were already beginning to emerge in the press.

text: Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union exploded its first thermonuclear device, designed by the physicist Andrei Sakharov, on August 12, 1953, labeled "Joe-4" by the West. This created concern within the U.S. government and military, because, unlike Mike, the Soviet device was a deliverable weapon, which the U.S. did not yet have. This first device though was arguably not a true hydrogen bomb, and could only reach explosive yields in the hundreds of kilotons (never reaching the megaton range of a staged weapon). Still, it was a powerful propaganda tool for the Soviet Union, and the technical differences were fairly oblique to the American public and politicians.

text: Following the Mike blast by less than a year, Joe-4 seemed to validate claims that the bombs were inevitable and vindicate those who had supported the development of the fusion program. Coming during the height of McCarthyism, the effect was pronounced on the security hearings in early 1954, which revoked former Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance on the grounds that he was unreliable, had not supported the American hydrogen bomb program, and had made long-standing left-wing ties in the 1930s. Edward Teller participated in the hearing as the only major scientist to testify against Oppenheimer, resulting in his virtual expulsion from the physics community.

text: On March 1, 1954, the U.S. detonated its first practical thermonuclear weapon (which used isotopes of lithium as its fusion fuel), known as the "Shrimp" device of the Castle Bravo test, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. The device yielded 15 megatons, more than twice its expected yield, and became the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history. The combination of the unexpectedly large blast and poor weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive nuclear fallout to contaminate over 7,000 square miles (18,000 km2). 239 Marshall Island natives and 28 Americans were exposed to significant amounts of radiation, resulting in elevated levels of cancer and birth defects in the years to come.[26]

text: The crew of the Japanese tuna-fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5, who had been fishing just outside the exclusion zone, returned to port suffering from radiation sickness and skin burns; one crew member was terminally ill. Efforts were made to recover the cargo of contaminated fish but at least two large tuna were probably sold and eaten. A further 75 tons of tuna caught between March and December were found to be unfit for human consumption. When the crew member died and the full results of the contamination were made public by the U.S., Japanese concerns were reignited about the hazards of radiation.[27]

text: The hydrogen bomb age had a profound effect on the thoughts of nuclear war in the popular and military mind. With only fission bombs, nuclear war was something that possibly could be limited. Dropped by planes and only able to destroy the most built up areas of major cities, it was possible for many to look at fission bombs as a technological extension of large-scale conventional bombing—such as the extensive firebombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II. Proponents brushed aside as grave exaggeration claims that such weapons could lead to worldwide death or harm.

text: Even in the decades before fission weapons, there had been speculation about the possibility for human beings to end all life on the planet, either by accident or purposeful maliciousness—but technology had not provided the capacity for such action. The great power of hydrogen bombs made worldwide annihilation possible.

text: The Castle Bravo incident itself raised a number of questions about the survivability of a nuclear war. Government scientists in both the U.S. and the USSR had insisted that fusion weapons, unlike fission weapons, were cleaner, as fusion reactions did not produce the dangerously radioactive by-products of fission reactions. While technically true, this hid a more gruesome point: the last stage of a multi-staged hydrogen bomb often used the neutrons produced by the fusion reactions to induce fissioning in a jacket of natural uranium, and provided around half of the yield of the device itself.

text: This fission stage made fusion weapons considerably more dirty than they were made out to be. This was evident in the towering cloud of deadly fallout that followed the Bravo test. When the Soviet Union tested its first megaton device in 1955, the possibility of a limited nuclear war seemed even more remote in the public and political mind. Even cities and countries that were not direct targets would suffer fallout contamination. Extremely harmful fission products would disperse via normal weather patterns and embed in soil and water around the planet.

text: Speculation began to run towards what fallout and dust from a full-scale nuclear exchange would do to the world as a whole, rather than just cities and countries directly involved. In this way, the fate of the world was now tied to the fate of the bomb-wielding superpowers.

text: Deterrence and brinkmanship[edit]

text: Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s the U.S. and the USSR both endeavored, in a tit-for-tat approach, to prevent the other power from acquiring nuclear supremacy. This had massive political and cultural effects during the Cold War.

text: The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were large, custom-made devices, requiring highly trained personnel for their arming and deployment. They could be dropped only from the largest bomber planes—at the time the B-29 Superfortress—and each plane could only carry a single bomb in its hold.

text: The first hydrogen bombs were similarly massive and complicated. This ratio of one plane to one bomb was still fairly impressive in comparison with conventional, non-nuclear weapons, but against other nuclear-armed countries it was considered a grave danger. In the immediate postwar years, the U.S. expended much effort on making the bombs "G.I.-proof"—capable of being used and deployed by members of the U.S. Army, rather than Nobel Prize–winning scientists. In the 1950s, the U.S. undertook a nuclear testing program to improve the nuclear arsenal.

text: Starting in 1951, the Nevada Test Site (in the Nevada desert) became the primary location for all U.S. nuclear testing (in the USSR, Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan served a similar role). Tests were divided into two primary categories: "weapons related" (verifying that a new weapon worked or looking at exactly how it worked) and "weapons effects" (looking at how weapons behaved under various conditions or how structures behaved when subjected to weapons).

text: In the beginning, almost all nuclear tests were either atmospheric (conducted above ground, in the atmosphere) or underwater (such as some of the tests done in the Marshall Islands). Testing was used as a sign of both national and technological strength, but also raised questions about the safety of the tests, which released nuclear fallout into the atmosphere (most dramatically with the Castle Bravo test in 1954, but in more limited amounts with almost all atmospheric nuclear testing).

text: Because testing was seen as a sign of technological development (the ability to design usable weapons without some form of testing was considered dubious), halts on testing were often called for as stand-ins for halts in the nuclear arms race itself, and many prominent scientists and statesmen lobbied for a ban on nuclear testing. In 1958, the U.S., USSR, and the United Kingdom (a new nuclear power) declared a temporary testing moratorium for both political and health reasons, but by 1961 the Soviet Union had broken the moratorium and both the USSR and the U.S. began testing with great frequency.

text: As a show of political strength, the Soviet Union tested the largest-ever nuclear weapon in October 1961, the massive Tsar Bomba, which was tested in a reduced state with a yield of around 50 megatons—in its full state it was estimated to have been around 100 Mt. The weapon was largely impractical for actual military use, but was hot enough to induce third-degree burns at a distance of 62 mi (100 km) away. In its full, dirty, design it would have increased the amount of worldwide fallout since 1945 by 25%.

text: In 1963, all nuclear and many non-nuclear states signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. The treaty permitted underground tests.

text: Most tests were considerably more modest, and worked for direct technical purposes as well as their potential political overtones. Weapons improvements took on two primary forms. One was an increase in efficiency and power, and within only a few years fission bombs were developed that were many times more powerful than the ones created during World War II. The other was a program of miniaturization, reducing the size of the nuclear weapons.

text: Smaller bombs meant that bombers could carry more of them, and also that they could be carried on the new generation of rockets in development in the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. rocket science received a large boost in the postwar years, largely with the help of engineers acquired from the Nazi rocketry program. These included scientists such as Wernher von Braun, who had helped design the V-2 rockets the Nazis launched across the English Channel. An American program, Project Paperclip, had endeavored to move German scientists into American hands (and away from Soviet hands) and put them to work for the U.S.

text: Weapons improvement[edit]

text: Early nuclear-tipped rockets—such as the MGR-1 Honest John, first deployed by the U.S. in 1953—were surface-to-surface missiles with relatively short ranges (around 15 mi/25 km maximum) and yields around twice the size of the first fission weapons. The limited range meant they could only be used in certain types of military situations. U.S. rockets could not, for example, threaten Moscow with an immediate strike, and could only be used as tactical weapons (that is, for small-scale military situations).

text: Strategic weapons—weapons that could threaten an entire country—relied, for the time being, on long-range bombers that could penetrate deep into enemy territory. In the U.S., this requirement led, in 1946, to creation of the Strategic Air Command—a system of bombers headed by General Curtis LeMay (who previously presided over the firebombing of Japan during WWII). In operations like Chrome Dome, SAC kept nuclear-armed planes in the air 24 hours a day, ready for an order to attack Moscow.

text: These technological possibilities enabled nuclear strategy to develop a logic considerably different from previous military thinking. Because the threat of nuclear warfare was so awful, it was first thought that it might make any war of the future impossible. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's doctrine of "massive retaliation" in the early years of the Cold War was a message to the USSR, saying that if the Red Army attempted to invade the parts of Europe not given to the Eastern bloc during the Potsdam Conference (such as West Germany), nuclear weapons would be used against the Soviet troops and potentially the Soviet leaders.

text: With the development of more rapid-response technologies (such as rockets and long-range bombers), this policy began to shift. If the Soviet Union also had nuclear weapons and a policy of "massive retaliation" was carried out, it was reasoned, then any Soviet forces not killed in the initial attack, or launched while the attack was ongoing, would be able to serve their own form of nuclear retaliation against the U.S. Recognizing that this was an undesirable outcome, military officers and game theorists at the RAND think tank developed a nuclear warfare strategy that was eventually called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

text: MAD divided potential nuclear war into two stages: first strike and second strike. First strike meant the first use of nuclear weapons by one nuclear-equipped nation against another nuclear-equipped nation. If the attacking nation did not prevent the attacked nation from a nuclear response, the attacked nation would respond with a second strike against the attacking nation. In this situation, whether the U.S. first attacked the USSR or the USSR first attacked the U.S., the end result would be that both nations would be damaged to the point of utter social collapse.

text: According to game theory, because starting a nuclear war was suicidal, no logical country would shoot first. However, if a country could launch a first strike that utterly destroyed the target country's ability to respond, that might give that country the confidence to initiate a nuclear war. The object of a country operating by the MAD doctrine is to deny the opposing country this first strike capability.

text: MAD played on two seemingly opposed modes of thought: cold logic and emotional fear. The English phrase MAD was often known by, "nuclear deterrence," was translated by the French as "dissuasion," and "terrorization" by the Soviets. This apparent paradox of nuclear war was summed up by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as "the worse things get, the better they are"—the greater the threat of mutual destruction, the safer the world would be.

text: This philosophy made a number of technological and political demands on participating nations. For one thing, it said that it should always be assumed that an enemy nation may be trying to acquire first strike capability, which must always be avoided. In American politics this translated into demands to avoid "bomber gaps" and "missile gaps" where the Soviet Union could potentially outshoot the Americans. It also encouraged the production of thousands of nuclear weapons by both the U.S. and the USSR, far more than needed to simply destroy the major civilian and military infrastructures of the opposing country. These policies and strategies were satirized in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets, unable to keep up with the US's first strike capability, instead plan for MAD by building a Doomsday Machine, and thus, after a (literally) mad US General orders a nuclear attack on the USSR, the end of the world is brought about.

text: The policy also encouraged the development of the first early warning systems. Conventional war, even at its fastest, was fought over days and weeks. With long-range bombers, from the start of a nuclear attack to its conclusion was mere hours. Rockets could reduce a conflict to minutes. Planners reasoned that conventional command and control systems could not adequately react to a nuclear attack, so great lengths were taken to develop computer systems that could look for enemy attacks and direct rapid responses.

text: The U.S. poured massive funding into development of SAGE, a system that could track and intercept enemy bomber aircraft using information from remote radar stations. It was the first computer system to feature real-time processing, multiplexing, and display devices. It was the first general computing machine, and a direct predecessor of modern computers.

text: Emergence of the anti-nuclear movement[edit]

text: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II quickly followed the 1945 Trinity nuclear test, and the Little Boy device was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of TNT, the blast and thermal wave of the bomb destroyed nearly 50,000 buildings and killed approximately 75,000 people.[28] Subsequently, the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles grew.[29]

text: Operation Crossroads was a series of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1946. Its purpose was to test the effect of nuclear weapons on naval ships. To prepare the Bikini atoll for the nuclear tests, Bikini's native residents were evicted from their homes and resettled on smaller, uninhabited islands where they were unable to sustain themselves.[30]

text: National leaders debated the impact of nuclear weapons on domestic and foreign policy. Also involved in the debate about nuclear weapons policy was the scientific community, through professional associations such as the Federation of Atomic Scientists and the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs.[31] Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing was first drawn to public attention in 1954 when a Hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific contaminated the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon.[32] One of the fishermen died in Japan seven months later. The incident caused widespread concern around the world and "provided a decisive impetus for the emergence of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in many countries".[32] The anti-nuclear weapons movement grew rapidly because for many people the atomic bomb "encapsulated the very worst direction in which society was moving".[33]

text: Peace movements emerged in Japan and in 1954 they converged to form a unified "Japanese Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs". Japanese opposition to the Pacific nuclear weapons tests was widespread, and "an estimated 35 million signatures were collected on petitions calling for bans on nuclear weapons".[33] The Russell–Einstein Manifesto was issued in London on July 9, 1955 by Bertrand Russell in the midst of the Cold War. It highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict. The signatories included eleven pre-eminent intellectuals and scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed it just days before his death on April 18, 1955. A few days after the release, philanthropist Cyrus S. Eaton offered to sponsor a conference—called for in the manifesto—in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Eaton's birthplace. This conference was to be the first of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, held in July 1957.

text: In the United Kingdom, the first Aldermaston March organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took place at Easter 1958, when several thousand people marched for four days from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment close to Aldermaston in Berkshire, England, to demonstrate their opposition to nuclear weapons.[34][35] The Aldermaston marches continued into the late 1960s when tens of thousands of people took part in the four-day marches.[33]

text: In 1959, a letter in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was the start of a successful campaign to stop the Atomic Energy Commission dumping radioactive waste in the sea 19 kilometres from Boston.[36] On November 1, 1961, at the height of the Cold War, about 50,000 women brought together by Women Strike for Peace marched in 60 cities in the United States to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. It was the largest national women's peace protest of the 20th century.[37][38]

text: In 1958, Linus Pauling and his wife presented the United Nations with the petition signed by more than 11,000 scientists calling for an end to nuclear-weapon testing. The "Baby Tooth Survey," headed by Dr Louise Reiss, demonstrated conclusively in 1961 that above-ground nuclear testing posed significant public health risks in the form of radioactive fallout spread primarily via milk from cows that had ingested contaminated grass.[39][40][41] Public pressure and the research results subsequently led to a moratorium on above-ground nuclear weapons testing, followed by the Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963 by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.[31][42][43]

text: Cuban Missile Crisis[edit]

text: Bombers and short-range rockets were not reliable: planes could be shot down, and earlier nuclear missiles could cover only a limited range— for example, the first Soviet rockets' range limited them to targets in Europe. However, by the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could be launched from extremely remote areas far away from their target. They had also developed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which had less range but could be launched from submarines very close to the target without any radar warning. This made any national protection from nuclear missiles increasingly impractical.

text: The military realities made for a precarious diplomatic situation. The international politics of brinkmanship led leaders to exclaim their willingness to participate in a nuclear war rather than concede any advantage to their opponents, feeding public fears that their generation may be the last. Civil defense programs undertaken by both superpowers, exemplified by the construction of fallout shelters and urging civilians about the survivability of nuclear war, did little to ease public concerns.

text: The climax of brinksmanship came in early 1962, when an American U-2 spy plane photographed a series of launch sites for medium-range ballistic missiles being constructed on the island of Cuba, just off the coast of the southern United States, beginning what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. administration of John F. Kennedy concluded that the Soviet Union, then led by Nikita Khrushchev, was planning to station Soviet nuclear missiles on the island, which was under the control of communist Fidel Castro. On October 22, Kennedy announced the discoveries in a televised address. He announced a naval blockade around Cuba that would turn back Soviet nuclear shipments, and warned that the military was prepared "for any eventualities." The missiles had 2,400 mile (4,000 km) range, and would allow the Soviet Union to quickly destroy many major American cities on the Eastern Seaboard if a nuclear war began.

text: The leaders of the two superpowers stood nose to nose, seemingly poised over the beginnings of a third world war. Khrushchev's ambitions for putting the weapons on the island were motivated in part by the fact that the U.S. had stationed similar weapons in Britain, Italy, and nearby Turkey, and had previously attempted to sponsor an invasion of Cuba the year before in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. On October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy offering to withdraw all missiles if Kennedy committed to a policy of no future invasions of Cuba. Khrushchev worded the threat of assured destruction eloquently:

text: "You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dreaded forces our two countries possess."

text: A day later, however, the Soviets sent another message, this time demanding that the U.S. remove its missiles from Turkey before any missiles were withdrawn from Cuba. On the same day, a U-2 plane was shot down over Cuba and another almost intercepted over the Soviet Union, as Soviet merchant ships neared the quarantine zone. Kennedy responded by accepting the first deal publicly, and sending his brother Robert to the Soviet embassy to accept the second deal privately. On October 28, the Soviet ships stopped at the quarantine line and, after some hesitation, turned back towards the Soviet Union. Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the removal of all missiles in Cuba, and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was moved to comment, "We went eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."

text: The Crisis was later seen as the closest the U.S. and the USSR ever came to nuclear war and had been narrowly averted by last-minute compromise by both superpowers. Fears of communication difficulties led to the installment of the first hotline, a direct link between the superpowers that allowed them to more easily discuss future military activities and political maneuverings. It had been made clear that missiles, bombers, submarines, and computerized firing systems made escalating any situation to Armageddon far more easy than anybody desired.

text: After stepping so close to the brink, both the U.S. and the USSR worked to reduce their nuclear tensions in the years immediately following. The most immediate culmination of this work was the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, in which the U.S. and USSR agreed to no longer test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. Testing underground continued, allowing for further weapons development, but the worldwide fallout risks were purposefully reduced, and the era of using massive nuclear tests as a form of saber rattling ended.

text: In December 1979, NATO decided to deploy cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe in response to Soviet deployment of intermediate range mobile missiles, and in the early 1980s, a "dangerous Soviet-US nuclear confrontation" arose.[44] In New York on June 12, 1982, one million people gathered to protest about nuclear weapons, and to support the second UN Special Session on Disarmament.[45][46] As the nuclear abolitionist movement grew, there were many protests at the Nevada Test Site. For example, on February 6, 1987, nearly 2,000 demonstrators, including six members of Congress, protested against nuclear weapons testing and more than 400 people were arrested.[47] Four of the significant groups organizing this renewal of anti-nuclear activism were Greenpeace, The American Peace Test, The Western Shoshone, and Nevada Desert Experience.

text: There have been at least four major false alarms, the most recent in 1995, that resulted in the activation of nuclear attack early warning protocols. They include the accidental loading of a training tape into the American early-warning computers; a computer chip failure that appeared to show a random number of attacking missiles; a rare alignment of the Sun, the U.S. missile fields and a Soviet early-warning satellite that caused it to confuse high-altitude clouds with missile launches; the launch of a Norwegian research rocket resulted in President Yeltsin activating his nuclear briefcase for the first time.[48]

text: Initial proliferation[edit]

text: In the fifties and sixties, three more countries joined the "nuclear club." The United Kingdom had been an integral part of the Manhattan Project following the Quebec Agreement in 1943. The passing of the McMahon Act by the United States in 1946 unilaterally broke this partnership and prevented the passage of any further information to the United Kingdom. The British Government, under Clement Attlee, determined that a British Bomb was essential. Because of British involvement in the Manhattan Project, Britain had extensive knowledge in some areas, but not in others.

text: An improved version of 'Fat Man' was developed, and on 26 February 1952, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that the United Kingdom also had an atomic bomb and a successful test took place on 3 October 1952. At first these were free-fall bombs, intended for use by the V Force of jet bombers. A Vickers Valiant dropped the first UK nuclear weapon on 11 October 1956 at Maralinga, South Australia. Later came a missile, Blue Steel, intended for carriage by the V Force bombers, and then the Blue Streak medium-range ballistic missile (later canceled). Anglo-American cooperation on nuclear weapons was restored by the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. As a result of this and the Polaris Sales Agreement, the United Kingdom has bought United States designs for submarine missiles and fitted its own warheads. It retains full independent control over the use of the missiles. It no longer possesses any free-fall bombs.

text: France had been heavily involved in nuclear research before World War II through the work of the Joliot-Curies. This was discontinued after the war because of the instability of the Fourth Republic and lack of finances.[49] However, in the 1950s, France launched a civil nuclear research program, which produced plutonium as a byproduct.

text: In 1956, France formed a secret Committee for the Military Applications of Atomic Energy and a development program for delivery vehicles. With the return of Charles de Gaulle to the French presidency in 1958, final decisions to build a bomb were made, which led to a successful test in 1960. Since then, France has developed and maintained its own nuclear deterrent independent of NATO.

text: In 1951, China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement whereby China supplied uranium ore in exchange for technical assistance in producing nuclear weapons. In 1953, China established a research program under the guise of civilian nuclear energy. Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union provided large amounts of equipment. But as the relations between the two countries worsened the Soviets reduced the amount of assistance and, in 1959, refused to donate a bomb for copying purposes. Despite this, the Chinese made rapid progress and tested an atomic bomb on October 16, 1964, at Lop Nur. They tested a nuclear missile on October 25, 1966, and a hydrogen bomb on June 14, 1967.

text: Chinese nuclear warheads were produced from 1968 and thermonuclear warheads from 1974.[50] It is also thought that Chinese warheads have been successfully miniaturised from 2200 kg to 700 kg through the use of designs obtained by espionage from the United States.[citation needed] The current number of warheads is unknown, but as of 2017 it is thought to be in the low hundreds.[51] China is the only nuclear weapons state to have guaranteed the non-first use of nuclear weapons.

text: Cold War[edit]

text: After World War II, the balance of power between the Eastern and Western blocs and the fear of global destruction prevented the further military use of atomic bombs. This fear was even a central part of Cold War strategy, referred to as the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. So important was this balance to international political stability that a treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (or ABM treaty), was signed by the U.S. and the USSR in 1972 to curtail the development of defenses against nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles that carry them. This doctrine resulted in a large increase in the number of nuclear weapons, as each side sought to ensure it possessed the firepower to destroy the opposition in all possible scenarios.

text: Early delivery systems for nuclear devices were primarily bombers like the United States B-29 Superfortress and Convair B-36, and later the B-52 Stratofortress. Ballistic missile systems, based on Wernher von Braun's World War II designs (specifically the V-2 rocket), were developed by both United States and Soviet Union teams (in the case of the U.S., effort was directed by the German scientists and engineers although the Soviet Union also made extensive use of captured German scientists, engineers, and technical data).

text: These systems were used to launch satellites, such as Sputnik, and to propel the Space Race, but they were primarily developed to create Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could deliver nuclear weapons anywhere on the globe. Development of these systems continued throughout the Cold War—though plans and treaties, beginning with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), restricted deployment of these systems until, after the fall of the Soviet Union, system development essentially halted, and many weapons were disabled and destroyed. On January 27, 1967, more than 60 nations signed the Outer Space Treaty, banning nuclear weapons in space.

text: There have been a number of potential nuclear disasters. Following air accidents U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost near Atlantic City, New Jersey (1957); Savannah, Georgia (1958) (see Tybee Bomb); Goldsboro, North Carolina (1961); off the coast of Okinawa (1965); in the sea near Palomares, Spain (1966) (see 1966 Palomares B-52 crash); and near Thule, Greenland (1968) (see 1968 Thule Air Base B-52 crash). Most of the lost weapons were recovered, the Spanish device after three months' effort by the DSV Alvin and DSV Aluminaut.

text: The Soviet Union was less forthcoming about such incidents, but the environmental group Greenpeace believes that there are around forty non-U.S. nuclear devices that have been lost and not recovered, compared to eleven lost by America, mostly in submarine disasters. The U.S. has tried to recover Soviet devices, notably in the 1974 Project Azorian using the specialist salvage vessel Hughes Glomar Explorer to raise a Soviet submarine. After news leaked out about this  boondoggle, the CIA would coin a favorite phrase for refusing to disclose sensitive information, called glomarization: We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed.[52]

text: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 essentially ended the Cold War. However, the end of the Cold War failed to end the threat of nuclear weapon use, although global fears of nuclear war reduced substantially. In a major move of symbolic de-escalation, Boris Yeltsin, on January 26, 1992, announced that Russia planned to stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.

text: Cost[edit]

text:
The designing, testing, producing, deploying, and defending against nuclear weapons is one of the largest expenditures for the nations which possess nuclear weapons. In the United States during the Cold War years, between "one quarter to one third of all military spending since World War II [was] devoted to nuclear weapons and their infrastructure." [53]
According to a retrospective Brookings Institution study published in 1998 by the Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Committee (formed in 1993 by the W. Alton Jones Foundation), the total expenditures for U.S. nuclear weapons from 1940 to 1998 was $5.5 trillion in 1996 Dollars.[54]

text: For comparison, the total public debt at the end of fiscal year 1998 was $5,478,189,000,000 in 1998 Dollars[55] or $5.3 trillion in 1996 Dollars. The entire public debt in 1998 was therefore equal to the cost of research, development, and deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons-related programs during the Cold War.[53][54][56]

text: Second nuclear age[edit]

text: The second nuclear age can be regarded as proliferation of nuclear weapons among lesser powers and for reasons other than the American-Soviet-Chinese rivalry.

text: India embarked relatively early on a program aimed at nuclear weapons capability, but apparently accelerated this after the Sino-Indian War of 1962. India's first atomic-test explosion was in 1974 with Smiling Buddha, which it described as a "peaceful nuclear explosion."

text: After the collapse  of Eastern Military High Command and the disintegration of Pakistan as a result of the 1971 Winter war, Bhutto of Pakistan launched scientific research on nuclear weapons. The Indian test caused Pakistan to spur its programme, and  the ISI conducted successful espionage operations in the Netherlands, while also developing the programme indigenously. India tested fission and perhaps fusion devices in 1998, and Pakistan successfully tested fission devices that same year, raising concerns that they would use nuclear weapons on each other.

text: All of the former Soviet bloc countries with nuclear weapons (Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) returned their warheads to Russia by 1996.

text: South Africa also had an active program to develop uranium-based nuclear weapons, but dismantled its nuclear weapon program in the 1990s.[57] Experts do not believe it actually tested such a weapon, though it later claimed it constructed several crude devices that it eventually dismantled. In the late 1970s American spy satellites detected a "brief, intense, double flash of light near the southern tip of Africa."[58] Known as the Vela Incident, it was speculated to have been a South African or possibly Israeli nuclear weapons test, though some feel that it may have been caused by natural events or a detector malfunction.

text: Israel is widely believed to possess an arsenal of up to several hundred nuclear warheads, but this has never been officially confirmed or denied (though the existence of their Dimona nuclear facility was confirmed by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986).

text: In January 2004, Dr A. Q. Khan of Pakistan's programme confessed to having been a key mover in "proliferation activities",[59] seen as part of an international proliferation network of materials, knowledge, and machines from Pakistan to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

text: North Korea announced in 2003 that it had several nuclear explosives. The first claimed detonation was the 2006 North Korean nuclear test, conducted on October 9, 2006. On May 25, 2009, North Korea continued nuclear testing, violating United Nations Security Council Resolution 1718. A third test was conducted on 13 February 2013, two tests were conducted in 2016 in January and September, followed by test a year later in September 2017.


document_title: 2016 Costa Book Awards

question_text: who won the 2016 costa book of the year

question_tokens: who won the 2016 costa book of the year

root

text: 2016 Costa Book Awards

text: Book of the Year[edit]

text: Winner: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry[1]

tag: ul

text: First Novel[edit]

text: Winner: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford[1]

text: Novel[edit]

text: Biography[edit]

text: Winner: Dadland by Keggie Carew

text: Poetry[edit]

text: Winner: Falling Awake by Alice Oswald[1]

text: Children's Book[edit]

text: Winner: The Bombs That Brought Us Together'' by Brian Conaghan[1]


document_title: James Wilson (House)

question_text: what episode of house does wilson get cancer

text: James Wilson (House)

text: Character biography[edit]

text: Wilson is one of three brothers.[3] He has an undergraduate degree from McGill University,[13] and graduate degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.[14] His father was Protestant and his mother was Jewish; he was raised in his mother's faith.[15]

tag: p

text: Shortly after a medical convention in New Orleans, after graduating medical school, Wilson accidentally broke an antique mirror and started a bar fight when another customer repeatedly played "Leave A Tender Moment Alone" by Billy Joel to the frustration of Wilson, who was going through a divorce with his first wife at the time.[16] House met him in jail and, motivated by a desire for companionship and by sheer boredom, bailed him out and hired an attorney to clear his name, thus starting their professional and personal relationship.[16] In the Season 1 episode "Histories", it is revealed that one of his brothers is homeless and that Wilson is unaware if he is still alive as he has not seen him in nine years.[17] Wilson has a history of failed marriages:[18] he is married to his third wife during Season 1 and, with the discovery of his wife's infidelity, separates from her during Season 2.[19] After the failure of his third marriage, Wilson lives in various temporary accommodations (including a stint at House's own apartment) until he meets Amber Volakis, who is a female substitute for House.[20] He is described as "nearly 40" in "Don't Ever Change", in Season 4, and by the end of Season 8, House describes him during a semi-mock DDx as a "46-year-old oncologist". Wilson and House's relationship has been sorely tested on many occasions.

text: He was diagnosed with stage II thymoma in the Season 8 episode "Body and Soul". In the end of the subsequent episode (in which Wilson and House take an abrupt vacation, and Wilson assumes a much more carefree personality), House performed a CT scan to check the status of the cancer. House's stunned facial expression and silence when the results are displayed seemingly does not bode well for Wilson's future prognosis, which would be revealed in the final two episodes of the series. It is later revealed that Wilson, should he pursue the most extensive treatment, could live for one to three years, perhaps. He opts to cease the intensive chemotherapy treatment after the ultimately unsuccessful first round, choosing to make the most of the remaining five months or so he would likely have for as long as possible; ultimately, after many tense conversations, House accepts his decision. However, due to the serious vandalism House caused in the toilet system and plumbing, which ultimately destroyed a room containing an MRI scanner (where some of his team members were with a patient), Foreman and the hospital lawyer notify House that the matter became externally known to the police; subsequently, his parole officer had his parole revoked by the court. House must report to prison again to serve the remaining six months of his approximately year-long sentence he got earlier, in the last season, when he ran his car into Cuddy's house. In the series finale, at House's funeral, Wilson gives an honest description of House as opposed to everyone's kind words and gets a text message telling him to "Shut up, you idiot."

text: To his shock, Wilson discovers House alive and well having faked his death and House asks Wilson how he wants to spend his last five months.  Sometime later, an unkempt Wilson and House are seen in the countryside on motorcycles, Wilson having presumably quit his job to spend his last five months as he wants.  He asks House about what they will do when the cancer gets bad, but House simply tells him that "cancer is boring" and they ride off together.

text: Characterization[edit]

text: House describes Wilson as "a buddy of mine people say 'Thank you' to, when he tells them they are dying."[21] House also describes Wilson as an "emotional vampire".[22] On a date with Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), Wilson evades a question as to whether or not he wants children.[21]

text: However, Wilson defends House when House's career is in jeopardy, after billionaire entrepreneur and then chairman of Princeton-Plainsboro's Board Edward Vogler (Chi McBride) proposes a motion for House's dismissal.[6] Wilson is the only one to vote against the motion. In response, Vogler proposes and succeeds in obtaining Wilson's dismissal, but Wilson is soon reinstated thanks to Cuddy after she convinces the board that Vogler is the real threat to the hospital and his money is not worth his business-obsessed mindset.[6] In a third-season episode, it is revealed that Wilson suffers from clinical depression and takes medication.[23] Wilson is also seen to write with his left hand, a trait he shares with Cuddy and Foreman,[24] but when he performs detailed medical work, such as injections or incisions, or gesticulates while speaking, appears to be right-handed in general, suggesting he may be ambidextrous.

text: Wilson attempts to change House's drug habits, with little success. After Cuddy makes a bet to prove House is addicted to Vicodin, House concedes to Wilson that he has an addiction but says that the addiction is not a problem.[25] It is, in fact, Wilson who usually writes House's Vicodin prescriptions (with Cuddy writing a few merely for leverage in her dealings with House). In Season 3, when Detective Michael Tritter (David Morse) threatens to jail House for his Vicodin addiction after finding a huge stash in his apartment, Wilson attempts to convince House to go to rehab as the situation worsens.[26] After Tritter pressures Wilson to testify several times, Wilson reluctantly agrees, unknown to House. Before this, Wilson watches House punch Dr. Robert Chase, insult Cuddy, and incorrectly diagnose a child with a condition that would have required the amputation of her left arm and leg.[27]

text: Near the end of Season 4, Wilson starts a romantic relationship with Amber Volakis, who is essentially a female version of House, and[20] who competed for one of the open jobs on House's team in the wake of Foreman, Chase, and Cameron's departure.[28] In the Season 4 finale, she dies after a bus crash sustained while picking up a drunken House from a bar.[29][30] Her death eventually leads Wilson to conclude that his relationship with House serves to enable House's dysfunctions. To remove himself from House's influence, he resigns from Princeton-Plainsboro at the beginning of Season 5.[31] The two reconcile when Wilson forces House to attend the funeral of House's father. Wilson realizes that he had been afraid of losing House, who is his true friend, and that Wilson's life didn't get any better when he resigned. He then returns to Princeton-Plainsboro.[16]

text: During Season 5, it is revealed that Wilson's homeless brother Danny suffered from schizophrenia since adolescence, which is what caused him to run away. Wilson blames himself for his brother's homelessness, having hung up on Danny right before he disappeared. Wilson also reveals to House that he took the position at Princeton-Plainsboro because it was near the place he had last seen Danny. When Wilson finds out that Danny is in the Psychiatric Ward of New York Mercy Hospital [fictional], House offers to come with him to keep him company, noting that it could end badly. However, when Wilson is let in to see his brother, House is busy with a differential with his team.

text: In Season 6, Episode 15, "Private Lives", House discovers that Wilson, in his youth, had been an actor in a porno flick titled "Feral Pleasures". Throughout the episode, after House hangs movie posters all over the hospital, people start paraphrasing a quote by Wilson's character: "Be not afraid. The forest nymphs have taught me how to please a woman".[32] In addition, Wilson proposes a joke marriage to House in "The Down Low".

text: Gay references have been made to the relationship between the two characters of the show. House has made a comment about the relationship ("I'm gay!...Oh that's not what you meant. It would explain a lot, though: no girlfriend, always with Wilson, the obsession with sneakers...").[33]  Barbara Barnett said that "House is the needy one in the relationship, and Wilson the doormat"[22] Verne Gay of Newsday described House's love for Wilson as "touching and genuine".[34] However, Robert Sean Leonard compared the relationship between the two to that of Cesar Millan and his Pit Bull, while Hugh Laurie said that it's "not just buddydom".[35] The two characters appeared on the October 13, 2008, cover of TV Guide.[36][37]

text: Concept and creation[edit]

text:
"I like being on the side, I like kind of being the friend who pokes his head in and says, "How ya doin'? OK," and then goes home".
—Leonard in an interview with BuddyTV.[38]

tag: div

text: Robert Sean Leonard was not initially interested in auditioning for the role of James Wilson.[39] He believes that he got the role because of his friendship with Bryan Singer, whom he had met in the past, shortly after he was paid for his role in Dead Poets' Society. Singer borrowed money from him to shoot Lion's Den starring his friend Ethan Hawke, who also attended high school with Singer.[39] In 2004, Leonard received the scripts for the pilot of both House and CBS' Numb3rs (in which he was asked to audition for the part of Charlie Eppes).[8] He thought the script for Numb3rs was "kinda cool". However, he decided to audition for the part of Wilson on House, because his character on Numb3rs was in almost every scene of the show.[8][39]

text: Within the scope of a popular comparison that draws parallels between House and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Wilson is equivalent to Doctor Watson.[7] In two-parts episodes such as Euphoria, Part 1 and Euphoria, Part 2, and House's Head and Wilson's Heart, Wilson's voice is heard narrating the story, while Dr. Watson is the character who narrates the stories in most of Sherlock Holmes novels. Leonard has said that his character and House were originally intended to play roles similar to Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, respectively, in the series although he believes that House's team has assumed the role of Watson since the show began.[7] Producer Katie Jacobs believes that Wilson and House both hide from mature relationships, which brings the two closer together.[40] She has said that the difference between the two characters is that Wilson finds it hard to say no because he wants to please the other person.[40] The similarities between Dr. Wilson and Dr. Watson was also one of the reasons that made Leonard choose House over Numb3rs.[8]

text: Leonard has said that Wilson is one of the few characters to voluntarily maintain a relationship with House, because neither of them work for one another and thus his character has "nothing to lose" by telling him the truth.[7] His character is one of the few who can make House laugh.[40] Katie Jacobs has said that Wilson's moving into House's apartment after a failed relationship in "Sex Kills" symbolizes his taking "emotional refuge" in his friend.[33] Leonard said that he was content with the size of his role.[41] He has also stated that he would "kill himself" if he had a role as big as the other cast members.[7]

text: Reception[edit]

text: Responses to Leonard's performance were mostly positive.[9][10] In a recap of the pilot episode, Tom Shales of The Washington Post quoted "Leonard has been playing upstanding young men for what seems like forever, but he's still one of the most outstanding upstanding young men in the acting racket".[42] However, Sherwin Nurland of Slate stated that Leonard often seems so detached that "he'd be better off in another show".[43] In a recap of the season four episode "Ugly" Nina Smith of TV Guide said that she thinks that the most convincing writing of the show has always been the scenes in which Cuddy and Wilson "spar" with House.[44] In a 2008 press conference, Katie Jacobs, who works as an executive producer for the show, praised Leonard for being equally adept at comedy and drama.[45] TV Gal, of Zap2it, stated that she "truly appreciates" what Leonard brings to the show, being the only character who "truly stands up to House" and "quietly and subtly" giving the show "some of its best moments".[46] In an article about whom to keep if the writers of House decided to minor down the cast, Maureen Ryan, of the Chicago Tribune said that Wilson can "never, never, never, never" leave the show.[12] Ryan also listed Wilson on her list of "5 Great Characters", saying that Leonard is the "underrated linchpin of the excellent “House” cast".[47]

text: After Wilson's temporary departure during House's fifth season, Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times immediately stated that she wanted the character to return to the show.[48] Linda Stasi of The New York Post said that Dr. House's relationship with Lucas Douglas (Michael Weston), who temporarily replaced Wilson, was far more natural than House's relationship with Wilson.[49] Critics from TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Blog Critics and USA Today, all found Leonard's performance in the season 4 finale worthy of an Emmy Award.[50][51][52][53][54]


document_title: Social Security number

question_text: who got the very first social security number

text: Social Security number

text: History[edit]

text: Social Security numbers were first issued by the Social Security Administration in November 1935 as part of the New Deal Social Security program. Within three months, 25 million numbers were issued.[4]

text: On November 24, 1936, 1,074 of the nation's 45,000 post offices were designated "typing centers" to type up Social Security cards that were then sent to Washington, D.C. On December 1, 1936, as part of the publicity campaign for the new program, Joseph L. Fay of the Social Security Administration selected a record from the top of the first stack of 1,000 records and announced that the first Social Security number in history was assigned to John David Sweeney, Jr., of New Rochelle, New York.[5][6]

text: Before 1986, people often did not obtain a Social Security number until the age of about 14,[7] since the numbers were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income.[8] The Tax Reform Act of 1986 required parents to list Social Security numbers for each dependent over the age of 5 for whom the parent wanted to claim a tax deduction.[9] Before this act, parents claiming tax deductions were simply trusted not to lie about the number of children they supported. During the first year of the Tax Reform Act, this anti-fraud change resulted in seven million fewer minor dependents being claimed. The disappearance of these dependents is believed to have involved either children who never existed or tax deductions improperly claimed by non-custodial parents.[10] In 1988, the threshold was lowered to 2 years old, and in 1990, the threshold was lowered yet again to 1 year old.[11] Today, an SSN is required regardless of the child's age to receive an exemption.[citation needed] Since then, parents have often applied for Social Security numbers for their children soon after birth; today, it can be done on the application for a birth certificate.[12]

text: Purpose and use[edit]

text: The original purpose of this number was to track individuals' accounts within the Social Security program.  It has since come to be used as an identifier for individuals within the United States, although rare errors occur where duplicates do exist.  As numbers are now assigned by the central issuing office of the SSA, it is unlikely that duplication will ever occur again. A few duplications did occur when prenumbered cards were sent out to regional SSA offices and (originally) Post Offices.

text: Employee, patient, student, and credit records are sometimes indexed by Social Security number.

text: The U.S. Armed Forces has used the Social Security number as an identification number for Army and Air Force personnel since July 1, 1969, the Navy and Marine Corps for their personnel since January 1, 1972, and the Coast Guard for their personnel since October 1, 1974.[13] Previously, the United States military used a much more complicated system of service numbers that varied by service.

text: Beginning in June 2011, DOD began removing the Social Security number from military identification cards. It is replaced by a unique DOD identification number, formerly known as the EDIPI.[14]

text: Non-universal status[edit]

text: Social Security was originally a universal tax, but when Medicare was passed in 1965, objecting religious groups in existence prior to 1951 were allowed to opt out of the system.[15]  Because of this, not every American is part of the Social Security program, and not everyone has a number. However, a social security number is required for parents to claim their children as dependents for federal income tax purposes,[12] and the Internal Revenue Service requires all corporations to obtain SSNs (or alternative identifying numbers) from their employees, as described below. The Old Order Amish have fought to prevent universal Social Security by overturning rules such as a requirement to provide a Social Security number for a hunting license.[16]

text: Social Security cards printed from January 1946 until January 1972 expressly stated that people should not use the number and card for identification.[17] Since nearly everyone in the United States now has an SSN, it became convenient to use it anyway and the message was removed.[18]

text: Since then, Social Security numbers have become de facto national identification numbers.[2] Although some people do not have an SSN assigned to them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to engage in legitimate financial activities such as applying for a loan or a bank account without one.[19] While the government cannot require an individual to disclose their SSN without a legal basis, companies may refuse to provide service to an individual who does not provide an SSN.[20][21] The card on which an SSN is issued is still not suitable for primary identification as it has no photograph, no physical description and no birth date. All it does is confirm that a particular number has been issued to a particular name. Instead, a driver's license or state ID card is used as an identification for adults.

text: Use required for federal tax purposes[edit]

text: Internal Revenue Code section 6109(d) provides: "The social security account number issued to an individual for purposes of section 205(c)(2)(A) of the Social Security Act [codified as 42 U.S.C. § 405(c)(2)(A)] shall, except as shall otherwise be specified under regulations of the Secretary [of the Treasury or his delegate], be used as the identifying number for such individual for purposes of this title [the Internal Revenue Code, title 26 of the United States Code]."[22]

text: The Internal Revenue Code also provides, when required by regulations prescribed by the Secretary [of the Treasury or his delegate]:

text:
Inclusion in returns: Any person required under the authority of this title to make a return, statement, or other document shall include in such return, statement, or other document such identifying number as may be prescribed for securing proper identification of such person.
Furnishing number to other persons: Any person with respect to whom a return, statement, or other document is required under the authority of this title to be made by another person or whose identifying number is required to be shown on a return of another person shall furnish to such other person such identifying number as may be prescribed for securing his proper identification.[23]

tag: ol

text: According to U.S. Treasury regulations, any person who, after October 31, 1962, works as an employee for wages subject to Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, or U.S. federal income tax withholdings is required to apply for "an account number" using "Form SS-5."[24]

text: A taxpayer who is not eligible to have a Social Security number must obtain an alternative Taxpayer Identification Number.

text: Types of Social Security cards[edit]

text: Three different types of Social Security cards are issued. The most common type contains the cardholder's name and number.  Such cards are issued to U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents. There are also two restricted types of Social Security cards:

text:
One reads "not valid for employment." Such cards cannot be used as proof of work authorization, and are not acceptable as a List C document on the I-9 form.
The other reads "valid for work only with DHS authorization", or the older, "valid for work only with INS authorization." These cards are issued to people who have temporary work authorization in the U.S.  They can satisfy the I-9 requirement, if they are accompanied by a work authorization card.

text: In 2004 Congress passed The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act; parts of which mandated that the Social Security Administration redesign the Social Security Number (SSN) Card to prevent forgery. From April 2006 through August 2007, Social Security Administration (SSA) and Government Printing Office (GPO) employees were assigned to redesign the Social Security Number Card to the specifications of the Interagency Task Force created by the Commissioner of Social Security in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security.

text: The new SSN card design utilizes both covert and overt security features created by the SSA and GPO design teams.

text: Identity theft[edit]

text: Many citizens and privacy advocates are concerned about the disclosure and processing of Social Security numbers.  Furthermore, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated an algorithm that uses publicly available personal information to reconstruct a given SSN.[25]

text: The SSN is frequently used by those involved in identity theft, since it is interconnected with many other forms of identification, and because people asking for it treat it as an authenticator. Financial institutions generally require an SSN to set up bank accounts, credit cards, and loans—partly because they assume that no one except the person it was issued to knows it.

text: Exacerbating the problem of using the Social Security number as an identifier is the fact that the Social Security card contains no biometric identifiers of any sort, making it essentially impossible to tell whether a person using a certain SSN truly belongs to someone without relying on other documentation (which may itself have been falsely procured through use of the fraudulent SSN). Congress has proposed federal laws that restrict the use of SSNs for identification and bans their use for a number of commercial purposes—e.g., rental applications.[26]

text: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offers alternatives to SSNs in some places where providing untrusted parties with identification numbers is essential. Tax return preparers must obtain and use a Preparer Tax Identification Number (PTIN) to include on their client's tax returns (as part of signature requirements). Day care services have tax benefits, and even a sole proprietor should give parents an EIN (employer identification number) to use on their tax return.

text: The Social Security Administration has suggested that, if asked to provide his or her Social Security number, a citizen should ask which law requires its use.[27] In accordance with §7213 of the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act of 2004 and 20 C.F.R. 422.103(e)(2), the number of replacement Social Security cards per person is generally limited to three per calendar year and ten in a lifetime.[27]

text: Identity confusion has also occurred because of the use of local Social Security numbers by the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, whose numbers overlap with those of residents of New Hampshire and Maine.[28]

text: Replacement numbers[edit]

text: A person can request a new Social Security number, but only under certain conditions;[29]

text:
Where sequential numbers assigned to members of the same family are causing problems.
In the event of duplicates having been issued.
In cases where the person has been a victim of domestic violence or harassment, and there is a clear need to change their number for their personal safety.[30]
When a person has been a victim of identity theft, and their Social Security number continues to be problematic.
Where a person has a demonstrable religious objection to a number (such as certain Christians being averse to the number 666).

text: For all of these conditions, credible third-party evidence such as a restraining order or police report, is required.

text: Structure[edit]

text: The Social Security number is a nine-digit number in the format "AAA-GG-SSSS".[31] The number is divided into three parts: the first three digits, known as the area number because they were formerly assigned by geographical region; the middle two digits, known as the group number; and the final four digits, known as the serial number.

text: On June 25, 2011, the SSA changed the SSN assignment process to "SSN randomization".[32] SSN randomization affected the SSN assignment process in the following ways:

text:
It eliminated the geographical significance of the first three digits of the SSN, referred to as the area number, by no longer allocating specific numbers by state for assignment to individuals.
It eliminated the significance of the highest group number assigned for each area number, and, as a result, the High Group List is frozen in time and can be used for validation of only those SSNs issued prior to the randomization implementation date (see section "Valid SSNs").
Previously unassigned area numbers have been introduced for assignment, excluding area numbers 000, 666 and 900–99.

text: Because Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) are issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), they were not affected by this SSA change.

text: Historical structure[edit]

text: Prior to the 2011 randomization process, the first three digits or area number were assigned by geographical region. Prior to 1973, cards were issued in local Social Security offices around the country and the area number represented the office code where the card was issued. This did not necessarily have to be in the area where the applicant lived, since a person could apply for their card in any Social Security office. Beginning in 1973, when the SSA began assigning SSNs and issuing cards centrally from Baltimore, the area number was assigned based on the ZIP Code in the mailing address provided on the application for the original Social Security card. The applicant's mailing address did not have to be the same as their place of residence. Thus, the area number did not necessarily represent the state of residence of the applicant regardless of whether the card was issued prior to, or after, 1973.

text: Generally, numbers were assigned beginning in the northeast and moving south and westward, so that people applying from addresses on the east coast had the lowest numbers and those on the west coast had the highest numbers. As the areas assigned to a locality were exhausted, new areas from the pool were assigned, so some states had noncontiguous groups of numbers.

text: The middle two digits or group number range from 01 to 99. Even before SSN randomization, the group numbers were not assigned consecutively within an area. Instead, for administrative reasons, group numbers were issued in the following order:[33]

text:
odd numbers from 01 through 09.
even numbers from 10 through 98.
even numbers from 02 through 08.
odd numbers from 11 through 99.

text: As an example, group number 98 would be issued before 11.

text: The last four digits are serial numbers. Before SSN randomization took effect, they represented a straight numerical sequence of digits from 0001 to 9999 within the group.

text: Valid SSNs[edit]

text: Prior to June 25, 2011, a valid SSN could not have an area number between 734 and 749, or above 772, the highest area number the Social Security Administration had allocated. Effective June 25, 2011, the SSA assigns SSNs randomly and allows for the assignment of area numbers between 734 and 749 and above 772 through the 800s.[34]  This should not be confused with Tax Identification Numbers (TINs), which include additional area numbers.[35]

text: Some special numbers are never allocated:

text:
Numbers with all zeros in any digit group (000-##-####, ###-00-####, ###-##-0000).[36][37]
Numbers with 666 or 900–999 (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) in the first digit group.[36]

text: Until 2011, the SSA published the last group number used for each area number.[38] Since group numbers were allocated in a regular pattern, it was possible to identify an unissued SSN that contained an invalid group number. Now numbers are assigned randomly, and fraudulent SSNs are not easily detectable with publicly available information. Many online services, however, provide SSN validation.

text: Unlike many similar numbers, no check digit is included.

text: Exhaustion and re-use[edit]

text: The Social Security Administration does not reuse Social Security numbers. It has issued over 450 million since the start of the program, and at a use rate of about 5.5 million per year. It says it has enough to last several generations without reuse or changing the number of digits.[39] However, there have been instances where multiple individuals have been inadvertently assigned the same Social Security number.[40]

text: SSNs used in advertising[edit]

text: Some SSNs used in advertising have rendered those numbers invalid. One famous instance of this occurred in 1938 when the E. H. Ferree Company in Lockport, New York, decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was placed in each wallet, which was sold by Woolworth and other department stores across the country; the wallet manufacturer's vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson used the actual SSN of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher.

text: Even though the card was printed in red (the real card is printed in blue) and had "Specimen" printed across the front, many people used Whitcher's SSN as their own. The Social Security Administration's account of the incident also claims that the fake card was half the size of a real card, despite a miniature card's being useless for its purpose and despite  Whitcher's holding two cards of apparently identical size in the accompanying photograph. Over time, the number that appeared (078-05-1120) has been claimed by a total of over 40,000 people as their own.[41] The SSA initiated an advertising campaign stating that it was incorrect to use the number (Hilda Whitcher was issued a new SSN). However, the number was found to be in use by 12 individuals as late as 1977.[41]

text: More recently, Todd Davis distributed his SSN in advertisements for his company's LifeLock identity theft protection service, which allowed his identity to be stolen over a dozen times.[42][43]

text: List of Social Security Area Numbers[edit]

text: List showing the geographical location of the first three digits of the social security numbers assigned in the United States and its territories since 1973. Repeated numbers indicate that they've been transferred to another location or they're shared by more than one location.

text:
SSN Area Number
Location[44]

001–003
New Hampshire

004–007
Maine

008–009
Vermont

010–034
Massachusetts

035–039
Rhode Island

040–049
Connecticut

050–134
New York

135–158
New Jersey

159–211
Pennsylvania

212–220
Maryland

221–222
Delaware

223–231
Virginia

232–236
West Virginia

232
North Carolina

237–246
North Carolina

247–251
South Carolina

252–260
Georgia

261–267
Florida

268–302
Ohio

303–317
Indiana

318–361
Illinois

362–386
Michigan

387–399
Wisconsin

400–407
Kentucky

408–415
Tennessee

416–424
Alabama

425–428
Mississippi

429–432
Arkansas

433–439
Louisiana

440–448
Oklahoma

449–467
Texas

468–477
Minnesota

478–485
Iowa

486–500
Missouri

501–502
North Dakota

503–504
South Dakota

505–508
Nebraska

509–515
Kansas

516–517
Montana

518–519
Idaho

520
Wyoming

521–524
Colorado

525,585
New Mexico

526–527
Arizona

528–529
Utah

530,680
Nevada

531–539
Washington

540–544
Oregon

545–573
California

574
Alaska

575–576
Hawaii

577–579
District of Columbia

580
Virgin Islands

580–584
Puerto Rico

586
Pacific Islands
Guam
American Samoa
Philippine Islands
Northern Mariana Islands

587–665
California (Southern California, presumably)'

667–679
Not Issued

681–699
Not Issued

700–728
Railroad Board (discontinued July 1, 1963)

729–730
Enumeration at Entry

750–772
Not Issued

tag: table

text: The above table is only valid for SSN issued before June 2011. On June 25, 2011, the SSA changed the SSN assignment process to "SSN randomization".[45] SSN randomization affects the SSN assignment process. Among its changes, it eliminates the geographical significance of the first three digits of the SSN, previously referred to as the Area Number, by no longer allocating the Area Numbers for assignment to individuals in specific states.  The table above is based on out-of-date information.  Numbers in the range of 650-699 most certainly have been issued (see related comment on the Talk page).