When We Learned to Love the Bomb

57 years ago Tuesday the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon, "First Lightening", in the woods of rural Kazakhstan. With a terrible glow and a mighty roar, the Cold War became a frigid reality for the inhabitants of a shaken globe. In recognition of their gruesome victory, Joseph Stalin and the Politburo awarded the responsible soviet scientists the prestigious "Order of Lenin." Relieved, the soviet team realized that they had narrowly escaped the sure penalty for failure- certain death by immediate execution or indirectly in the labor camps of bleak Siberia.

The onset of the Atomic Age was frightening, as it represented the coming of a different era in human history. An old, pre-WW2 system of nation states was fading before a new bi-polar order. It was the struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R., democracy and communism, free commerce and agrarian labor, freedom and servitude. While the Iron Curtain had already slammed closed in the days immediately following Berlin's collapse, the first Soviet nuclear test presented a moment of historical and political clarity. Harry Truman understood the urgency of his station in time, and answered the Soviet's challenge by testing the world's first hydrogen bomb "Mike" in 1952. Our course, generated by Truman's initiative, led to ultimate victory over communist Russia.

It may be worth remembering, 15 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, that we are again in a period of great and tumultuous historical transition. The crash of two towers in New York which we will commemorate soon, smoking and smoldering embers still yet unsettled, has signaled yet another violent change in the political order of the planet. A world balanced between two powers has mutated into a battlefield of interests seeking the security of a symbiotic geopolitical arrangement. New technologies and attitudes have accelerated events, perhaps too quickly to comfortably comprehend. Consequently, the next 10 years may very well determine the make-up of the world's political identity for the next 100 years. Change is not an option. How we handle it is.