Aug. 31, 1961 - The Soviet Union announced today it would resume testing of nuclear weapons. The Government statement said that Soviet scientists are now able to create a series of super-powerful nuclear bombs with an explosive force equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. Moscow asserted it had been compelled to undertake these plans because of the "threatening attitude" of the U.S. and its allies in the Berlin dispute. It warned that the Soviet Union possessed rockets capable of delivering a super-bomb "to any point on the globe from which an attack on the Soviet Union or other Socialist [Communist] countries can be launched." The rockets were described as "similar to those which Maj. Yuri Gagarin and Maj. Gherman Titov used for their unrivaled cosmic flights around the earth."
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