The world's only mega-bomber
That the quotes are apocryphal is beside the point. They indicated directions in which the countries were likely to go. In the event, America got there first: it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, becoming the first and only country in the world to have deployed nuclear weapons. China took a half-century more to get to a place where it can use nuclear weapons—but has refrained, as a matter of policy, from even hinting at the possibility of ever using them.
The US went on to design other big bombs: the 6,800-kg 'daisy cutter', which it used in Vietnam, the Gulf War and outside the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan in 2001. When it was 'retired' in 2008, it was replaced with the 9,850 kg Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, or 'mother of all bombs') first used in 2017 in Afghanistan and still in stock. And in 2011, the US made the 'biggest bomb of them all'—the 12,304-kg Massive Ordnance Penetrator or 'bunker buster'. After 14 years of aggregating 20 of these gigabombs, the US used them on Iran.
In effect, in order to escape proscriptions in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons or NPT, to which the US is a founder-signatory, America went the way of non-nuclear devices with the explosive output of a small, tactical nuclear bomb.
In her 2007 book, The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, Nina Tannenwald wrote about the 'four critical instances where US leaders considered using nuclear weapons—Japan 1945, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War 1991'. That they did not was because of the so-called 'nuclear taboo', a moral construct that exists and, going by the number of nuclear weapon-owning countries that have not signed the NPT, despite the prevalence in governmentalmilitary quarters of the rationalist deterrence theory (or MAD, mutually assured destruction). But the way around the albatrosses of the 'nuclear taboo' and the NPT is building bigger and more destructive non-nuclear bombs. This is the route the US has taken.
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