On this day, January 7, in 1953

President Harry Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb. One year earlier, the US had detonated the first weapon of this kind in an experiment known as the "Ivy Mike" nuclear test. Similar devices were also developed and tested by countries such as the Soviet Union, the UK, France, and China. The American government continued to perfect its own nuclear technology and in 1954 performed another experiment, which turned out to be the largest nuclear test ever carried out by the US. When a hydrogen bomb is detonated, it produces an explosion that is hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki… Talk about weapons of mass destruction.