![]() ![]() (A month before the Iowa caucuses, when Trump was asked about Kim Jong-un, he sounded almost admiring: "If you look at North Korea, this guy, I mean, he's like a maniac, O.K.? And you've got to give him credit. That didn’t stop Trump from saying that “it's just one more massive failure from a failed Secretary of State,” but facts often seem to get in Trump’s way. Trump, a reality-show host and real-estate developer not known for his keen understanding of the world, has tried to blame his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for North Korea’s nuclear program, even though the country’s first, one-kiloton test came in October, 2006, when George W. The Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. The nuclear physicist John von Neumann, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, called that combination-a thermonuclear warhead and a missile able to travel from continent to continent in minutes-“the thermonuclear breakthrough,” the ultimate weapon for mass murder. In 1950, Truman announced a program to build the first thermonuclear weapon-the hydrogen bomb. (The United States by then had set off eight atomic explosions, including Trinity and the devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August, 1945.) Like the North Korean tests, each one advanced the knowledge of nuclear destruction. Within two months of the 1949 Soviet test, the Defense Department and Atomic Energy Commission announced a series of secret atomic tests at the Eniwetok Atoll, in the central Pacific. The explosions North Korea has staged so far are small by modern nuclear standards-but that’s not much comfort. North Korea may have a funny-looking leader, but a few months ago the man with the goofy haircut bragged about being able to obliterate Manhattan. There is nonetheless widespread agreement that North Korea is getting closer to its boast of making a nuclear warhead that can be miniaturized and attached to a ballistic missile. Detection of the Soviet explosion in 1949 was described by what press accounts referred to as “a source close to Truman” as a “miracle of intelligence” uncertainty about the January event may bespeak a need for better intelligence. In 1949, even after the explosion, Truman still seemed to doubt that the Russians had the know-how to make a functioning atomic bomb, just as some Western experts doubted North Korea’s claim, in January, that it had successfully tested a small hydrogen bomb. ![]() ![]() Unlike the Russian bomb, the announcement, last week, that North Korea had conducted its fifth underground nuclear test, and its most powerful to date, was not at all surprising, but it was similarly worrisome. One reporter scanned it and called out, “Russia has the atomic bomb!” The President’s careful statement did not say that, exactly, but, rather, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” Few, though, doubted that this was the end of the American nuclear monopoly, which had lasted since the Trinity test, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The journalists returned to Ross’s office, the door was closed, and Ross handed out copies of a statement by Truman. Ross, President Harry Truman’s press secretary, when Ross’s secretary told everyone to stick around. On September 23, 1949, a group of White House correspondents was just leaving its usual session with Charles G. President Harry Truman concludes a press conference in which he said that the United States would consider using a nuclear weapon in the Korean War. ![]()
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