The Second World War came to an abrupt and decisive end, when the United States detonated twin nuclear bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus ended the world's most costly conflict, while, at the same time, beginning the “Nuclear Era.”

For the next 79 years the world has existed in an uneasy truce. A time when the two principal nuclear super-powers, the United States, and initially the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, face each other with the weapons of global annihilation.