In general, however, the design of nuclear weapons has been the most closely guarded secret until long after the secrets had been independently developed-or stolen-by all the major powers and a number of lesser ones. Diagrams of the general principles of operation of thermonuclear weapons have been available in very general terms since at least 1969 in at least two encyclopedia articles, and open literature research into inertial confinement fusion has been at least richly suggestive of how the "secondary" and "inter" stages of thermonuclear weapons work. Pictures of nuclear weapons themselves (the actual casings) were not made public until 1960, and even those were only mock-ups of the " Fat Man" and " Little Boy" weapons dropped on Japan-not the more powerful weapons developed more recently. After the United States began a regular program of nuclear testing in the late 1940s, continuing through the 1950s (and matched by the Soviet Union), the mushroom cloud has served as a symbol of the weapons themselves. The first pictures released of a nuclear explosion-the blast from the Trinity test-focused on the fireball itself later pictures would focus primarily on the mushroom cloud that followed. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the "atomic age", and the bleak pictures of the bombed-out cities released shortly after the end of World War II became symbols of the power and destruction of the new weapons (it is worth noting that the first pictures released were only from distances, and did not contain any human bodies-such pictures would only be released in later years). The now-familiar peace symbol was originally a specifically anti-nuclear weapons icon.
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