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Arms Race Begins
    W HEN THE new president, Harry Truman, told Joseph Stalin about the successful first atomic test in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, he thought he was breaking news to the Soviet dictator. But strategic arms competition was already underway between the two ostensible allies even before World War II ended. Spies—including Ted Hall, an American, and Klaus Fuchs, a German who had recently escaped to Britain—had brought Stalin the precise details of the Manhattan Project. During the chaos at the end of the war, captured German scientists also aided the Russian program. The Russians kidnapped scientists they found in their sector and kept them in Russia for six years before allowing them to return to Germany in 1952. America, too, got help from German scientists (most notably, chief German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who led the American space program through the 1969 moon landing).
    The Soviet goal was not just to have an atomic bomb. Fuchs and others had alerted the Soviets that the Americans mulled over a program to build an even mightier bomb, known around Los Alamos as the “Super.” In fact, no program was begun, as all effort at Los Alamos was directed towards finishing the atomic bomb project as soon as possible, so as to hasten the end of the war.
    President Truman directed at the start of 1950 that the Super be built, not knowing if Russia had an H-bomb program. Paul Nitze (who during the 45 years of the Cold War served in more senior national security capacities than anyone else) recalled that Truman’s decision to build the Super was guided ultimately by fear that Stalin would go ahead if advised such a device were technically feasible. In fact, Stalin had authorized the Russian H-bomb program two months after the Soviet Union’s first atomic test, and three months before Truman authorized the American one.
    For decades the myth persisted that if only the U.S. had refrained from developing the hydrogen bomb, the Russians might well have reciprocated. But the memoirs of Andrei Sakharov, the so-called father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a prominent antinuclear weapons advocate, demolish that theory. Sakharov makes clear that had America held back, Stalin and his legendarily sadistic secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria would have exploited such restraint:
The Soviet Government (or, more properly, those in power: Stalin, Beria and company) already understood the potential of the new weapon, and
nothing could have dissuaded them from going forward with its development.
Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuver or as evidence of stupidity or weakness. In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap, and to exploit the adversary’s folly at the earliest opportunity. (Emphasis added.)
     
    American diplomat George Kennan, a senior official serving in Russia during much of Stalin’s tenure, gave this grim assessment of Stalin:
His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed, often they were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.
     
    The need to raise public awareness of the challenge posed by Stalin prompted Winston Churchill’s famous words in his March 5, 1946, address at Fulton, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
    Kennan, for his part, writing in 1947 under the pseudonym “X” for the influential journal
Foreign Affairs
, literally defined America’s post-war “containment” strategy:
The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.…
     
Soviet pressure