The USSR tested their first atomic device, "First Lightning." It was an an implosive type plutonium bomb, detonated at the Semipalatinsk test range, giving up to a 20 kiloton yield. In the U.S. it was called Joe No. 1 ("Joe" was nickname for Y. Stalin.) This event came five years earlier than anyone in the West had predicted, largely due to one man, the spy Klaus Fuchs. As a Los Alamos physicist, Fuchs had passed detailed blue prints of the original American Trinity bomb design to the Russians. With the emergence of the USSR as a nuclear rival, America's monopoly of atomic weaponry was ended giving the U.S. strong motivation for intensifying its program of nuclear testing. Thus the Cold War was launched. On 23 Sep 1949, President Truman announced the Soviet detonation to the American public.

Warren Steed Jeffs is arrested in Nevada by a local patrol officer, Warren Jeffs was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List due to his involvement for alleged arrangement of extralegal marriages between his adult male followers and underage girls. He was the leader of the controversial polygamist sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and in November 20th, 2007 he was found guilty of multiple charges and sentenced to 10 years to life imprisonment.