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Pre-emptive Nuclear Strike
In nuclear strategy, a first strike or preemptive strike is a preemptive surprise attack employing overwhelming force. First strike capability is a country's ability to defeat another nuclear power by destroying its arsenal to the point where the attacking country can survive the weakened retaliation while the opposing side is left unable to continue war. The preferred methodology is to attack the opponent's strategic nuclear weapon facilities (missile silos, submarine bases, bomber airfields), command and control sites, and storage depots first. The strategy is called counterforce. Historical background ''First-strike attack'', the use of a nuclear first strike capability, was greatly feared during the Cold War between NATO and the Soviet Bloc. At various points, fear of a first strike attack existed on both sides. Misunderstood changes in posture and well understood changes in technology used by either side often led to speculation regarding the enemy's intentions. 1948– ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Strategy
Nuclear strategy involves the development of military doctrine, doctrines and strategy, strategies for the production and use of nuclear weapons. As a sub-branch of military strategy, nuclear strategy attempts to match nuclear weapons as means to political ends. In addition to the actual use of nuclear weapons whether tactical nuclear weapon, in the battlefield or strategic nuclear weapon, strategically, a large part of nuclear strategy involves their use as a bargaining tool. Some of the issues considered within nuclear strategy include: *Conditions which serve a nation's interest to develop nuclear weapons *Types of nuclear weapons to be developed *How and when weapons are to be used Many strategists argue that nuclear strategy differs from other forms of military strategy. The immense and terrifying power of the weapons makes their use, in seeking victory in a traditional military sense, impossible. Perhaps counterintuitively, an important focus of nuclear strategy has be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hungarian Revolution Of 1956
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 4 November 1956; ), also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Soviet Union (USSR). The uprising lasted 15 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on 7 November 1956 (outside of Budapest firefights lasted until at least 12 November 1956).Granville, Johanna. The First Domino: International Decision Making During the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, pp. 94-195. Thousands were killed or wounded, and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country. The Hungarian Revolution began on 23 October 1956 in Budapest when university students appealed to the civil populace to join them at the Hungarian Parliament Building to protest against the USSR's geopolitical domination of Hungary through the Stalinist government of Mátyás Rákosi. A delegation of s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuba
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the northern Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet. Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), south of both Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the List of countries and dependencies by population, third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area. The territory that is now Cuba was inhabited as early as the 4th millennium BC, with the Guanahatabey and Taino, Taíno peoples inhabiting the area at the time of Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spanish colonization ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis () in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis (), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of Nuclear weapons delivery, nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16to28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered List of nuclear close calls, the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale Nuclear warfare, nuclear war. In 1961, the US government put PGM-19 Jupiter, Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It had trained a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles, expatriate Cubans, which the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA led in an attempt to Bay of Pigs Invasion, invade Cuba and overthrow its government. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a violent campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tsar Bomba
The Tsar Bomba (code name: ''Ivan'' or ''Vanya''), also known by the alphanumerical designation "AN602", was a Thermonuclear weapon, thermonuclear aerial bomb, and by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. The Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov oversaw the project at Arzamas-16, while the main work of design was by Sakharov, Viktor Adamsky, Yuri Babayev, , and Yuri Trutnev (scientist), Yuri Trutnev. The project was ordered by General Secretary of the Communist Party, First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev in July 1961 as part of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing after the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty#Khrushchev and a moratorium: 1958–1961, Test Ban Moratorium, with the detonation timed to coincide with the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Tested on 30 October 1961, the test verified new design principles for high-yield thermonuclear charges, allowing, as its final report put it, the design o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berlin Crisis Of 1961
The Berlin Crisis of 1961 () was the last major European political and military incident of the Cold War concerning the status of the German capital city, Berlin, and of History of Germany (1945–90), post–World War II Germany. The crisis culminated in the city's ''de facto'' Partition (politics), partition with the East Germany, East German erection of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the second attempt by Premier of the Soviet Union, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to change the status of Berlin by demanding the withdrawal of all armed forces from the city and stopping the mass exodus of East Germans fleeing to the West. After the failure of his first Berlin Crisis of 1958–1959, ultimatum in 1958, Khrushchev renewed his demands at the 1961 Vienna summit, this time challenging the newly inaugurated U.S. President John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy. When talks broke down and no agreement was reached, in August 1961 East German leader Walter Ulbricht, with Khru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Gary Powers
Francis Gary Powers (August 17, 1929August 1, 1977) was an American pilot who served as a United States Air Force officer and a CIA employee. Powers is best known for his involvement in the 1960 U-2 incident, when he was shot down while flying a secret CIA spying mission over the Soviet Union. Powers survived, but was captured and sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison for espionage. He served 21 months of his sentence before being released in a prisoner swap in 1962. After returning to the US, he worked at Lockheed as a test pilot for the U-2, and later as a helicopter pilot for Los Angeles news station KNBC. He died in 1977, when the KNBC helicopter he was flying crashed. Early life and education Powers was born August 17, 1929, in Jenkins, Kentucky, the son of Oliver, a coal miner, and his wife Ida. Powers was the only boy among the family's six children. Oliver, who often struggled to make ends meet, wanted his son to be a physician. When Powers was fourteen, he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1960 U-2 Incident
On 1 May 1960, a United States Lockheed U-2, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces while conducting photographic aerial reconnaissance inside Soviet Union, Soviet territory. Flown by American pilot Francis Gary Powers, the aircraft had taken off from PAF Base Peshawar, Peshawar, Pakistan, and crashed near Sverdlovsk, Russia, Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterinburg), after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. Powers parachuted to the ground and was captured. Initially, American authorities claimed the incident involved the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases. The incident occurred during the tenures of American president Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, around two ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Missile Gap
In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR's missiles in comparison with those of the U.S., causing a lack of military parity. The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR's weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional. John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was informed of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he kne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bomber Gap
A bomber is a military combat aircraft that utilizes air-to-ground weaponry to drop bombs, launch torpedoes, or deploy air-launched cruise missiles. There are two major classifications of bomber: strategic and tactical. Strategic bombing is done by heavy bombers primarily designed for long-range bombing missions against strategic targets to diminish the enemy's ability to wage war by limiting access to resources through crippling infrastructure, reducing industrial output, or inflicting massive civilian casualties to an extent deemed to force surrender. Tactical bombing is aimed at countering enemy military activity and in supporting offensive operations, and is typically assigned to smaller aircraft operating at shorter ranges, typically near the troops on the ground or against enemy shipping. Bombs were first dropped from an aircraft during the Italo-Turkish War, with the first major deployments coming in the First World War and Second World War by all major airforces, dam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sputnik
Sputnik 1 (, , ''Satellite 1''), sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries became depleted. Aerodynamic drag caused it to fall back into the atmosphere on 4 January 1958. It was a polished metal sphere in diameter with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable by amateur radio operators, and the 65° orbital inclination made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. The satellite's success was unanticipated by the United States. This precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race. The launch was the beginning of a new era of political, military, technological, and scientific developments. The word ''sputnik'' is Russian for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
