Download or read book The Fire of the Gods: Oppenheimer's Legacy - The Evolutionary History of Nuclear Age - Part 3 - 1970-1980 written by Rajat Narang and published by Rajat Narang. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book-3 of the series; based on recently declassified documents by the CIA , U.S. State Department, KGB after the end of Cold War and other international agencies; takes-off at the onset of the 1970s decade, when, after having developed deployed hundreds of ICBMs & SLBMs armed to the teeth with megaton-class thermonuclear warheads, both the U.S. as well as the U.S.S.R were faced with the urgent need to invest billions of dollars, once again, towards the development of Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Systems to protect themselves against the ICBMs. The Soviets, incredibly, had deployed around 1,000 heavy ICBMs hosting a massive & insane 6,000+ megatons worth of thermonuclear warheads, collectively posing a grave danger to the U.S. homeland as well as NATO allies while the U.S. had a clear overmatch in Heavy Bombers and SLBMs over the Soviets. The cost of development of a comprehensive ABM System to secure the entire U.S. had been pegged at $40 billion in the mid-1960s, equivalent of almost $400 billion today, which, still would have sparked another arms race between them. Both the superpowers, however, chose to instead negotiate to mutually limit the scope of the threat and shake hands which paved the way for détente and arms control agreements under SALT-I in 1972, a groundbreaking event, followed by the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which briefly altered the course of the Cold War...