Although the United States and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies, by this time they had become peacetime enemies with conflicting ideologies and competing global interests.
In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. The exclusiveness was short-lived, however. In 1945 the United States possessed a monopoly on this new dreadful weapon. They killed by sheer magnitude of the blast and the resulting firestorm, and they killed by means of nuclear fallout. Unlike conventional bombs, these new atomic bombs killed in two ways. In August 1945 the United States unleashed a new weapon of mass destruction against the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and brought an end to World War II. Photographs and Pamphlet about Nuclear Fallout
