Today in the Sobel Timeline: March 19

On March 19, 1966, the German Empire became the second nation-state to successfully test an atomic bomb, at a test facility in the eastern regions of the Associated Russian Republics. The test brought the Germans to parity with Great Britain, which had tested its own atomic bomb thirteen months earlier, and ended an international crisis involving uncertainty over whether the British would carry out an atomic attack on the Germans. Sobel does not say whether fear of retaliation by Kramer Associates dissuaded the British from acting, but that seems to be a reasonable conjecture.