The Balance of Terror

During the Cold War, the two sides carried on a frenzied race to build and stockpile conventional and nuclear weapons, with increasingly terrifying powers of destruction. The round cinema screen on your left reminds us that the principle of nuclear deterrence was above all rooted in a reciprocal terror that had taken hold since 1945. The films on display here show how civilians and soldiers on both sides prepared themselves for a nuclear attack.

Educational films shown in schools, clips of manoeuvres in case of a nuclear attack, propaganda films … were without exception intensely frightening. Fear of the nuclear bomb had now become a deep-rooted psychosis and an unbelievable political instrument.

A staircase then leads you down to the basement, in the half-light of a steel and concrete crypt, where you find the imposing silhouette of a Soviet jet-fighter, the symbolic MIG-21 which was used widely during the Cold War. In front is an American thermonuclear bomb, sitting inert on a trolley, with a megaton’s worth of power (50 times that of Hiroshima), the very one that equipped all B-52 bombers kept in the air round-the-clock. Before leaving this troubling room, spend a moment before a third weapon, French this time, fitted into its launch silo: the nuclear warhead of a SSBSS3 thermonuclear missile, from the Albion Plateau launch site in Haute-Provence.

This was a plutonium bomb, a type Mark 28 H bomb. “Little Boy”, dropped over Hiroshima, was numbered “Mark 1”. “Fat Man”, which destroyed Nagasaki, was “Mark 2”. The “Mark 28” bomb therefore continued the series. Some 4,500 of them were first made in 1958, making it the most widely produced atomic bomb during the Cold War, between 1958 and 1991. This particular «Mark 28» version dates from 1962.