The Monopoly Breaks | Nuclear Nine — Part 2 of 8

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Santa Fe, June 1945.

[00:00:04]A German refugee named Klouse Fuks hands a sealed envelope to a stranger on a quiet side street. Inside is the complete design of the American atomic bomb. It hasn't even been tested yet.

[00:00:19]Weeks later, Trinity, the bomb works.

[00:00:24]Within 4 years, the Soviet Union has one, too.

[00:00:29]Part two, the monopoly breaks.

[00:00:34]Fuks takes no money. A communist who fled the Nazis in 1933.

[00:00:39]He believes no single country should hold this weapon alone. Soviet intelligence has been collecting every page of nuclear research since 1942.

[00:00:49]The operation is called Enormos.

[00:00:53]Soviet chief designer Julie Karaton uses Fuks's diagrams to build a copy bolt forbolt.

[00:01:02]August 29th, 1949 at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. The first Soviet bomb detonates 22 kilotons built from Fat Man's blueprint.

[00:01:17]Within days, a US surveillance plane picks up radioactive dust drifting across the Pacific. Truman goes public before Moscow can. The 4-year American monopoly is over.

[00:01:31]America's answer was a bigger bomb.

[00:01:35]Edward Teller had been pushing for a hydrogen bomb, orders of magnitude beyond anything before.

[00:01:43]November 1st, 1952.

[00:01:46]America detonates the first hydrogen bomb, 10.4 megat tons. The island it sat on disappears.

[00:01:55]3 years later, Soviet physicist Andre Sakurov delivers a true two-stage answer. Both sides now have hydrogen bombs. In 1957, Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolof launches a metal sphere called Sputnik into orbit. His rocket is the world's first intercontinental missile from Moscow to New York in 30 minutes. There is no defense.

[00:02:25]In 1961, the Soviets test the largest bomb ever made, 50 megat tons, more powerful than every bomb of World War II combined.

[00:02:38]But the race was already spreading across the Atlantic. Britain and France had already begun. The world would eventually peak at over 70,000 warheads, almost all American and Soviet.

[00:02:54]Follow for part three, the patron