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of liquid oxygen (for which Russian industry, he wrote Stalin in disgust, was altogether unprepared), and monitored Western physics and physicists as best he could. Good intelligence on the infant state of the German nuclear program gave further disincentive to push forward into the expensive unknown. But in the fall of 1941 the Soviets learned of the recently written MAUD Report, in which British scientists concluded that the production of atomic bombs might be feasible. Slowly the state reacted. In early 1943, Stalin authorized a limited program to build a nuclear weapon. The decision coincided with the initiation of a Soviet counteroffensive out of Stalingrad, codenamed Operation Uran—‘Uranus’, or more likely ‘uranium’. Stalin did not, in Holloway’s view, believe a Soviet atomic bomb would ever prove decisive against the Germans. Instead, ‘the project he started is best understood as a rather small hedge against future uncertainties’. Igor Kurchatov, who had vowed not to shave his robust beard until ‘Fritz’ was beaten, was put in charge of the project, and in early March Foreign Minister Molotov sat him down with a stack of papers smuggled out of Britain by Soviet agents. These materials, concerning especially isotope separation techniques and the morphology of a chain reaction, were, according to Kurchatov, of ‘huge, inestimable significance for our state and science’.16

3. The Soviets’ atomic spies

These materials were transmitted by men working secretly for the Soviet Union and without the knowledge or permission of the British government. Later there would be more, and more valuable, information about the state of the British and American atomic-bomb programs, sent to Moscow by spies such as John Cairncross (the probable source of the data Kurchatov saw in early 1943), Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass, and Julius Rosenberg. That these men, and others, provided important atomic intelligence to the Soviets is no longer in doubt: evidence gleaned from a US National Security Agency (NSA) top-secret codebreaking operation that ran for over three decades following the end of the Second World War, called ‘Venona’, shows that the Soviets had a number of spies in the United States, several of whom conveyed substantial knowledge of the Manhattan Project through handlers attached to the Soviet embassy or consulates. Venona, revealed fully only after the Cold War had ended in the mid-1990s, contained roughly 3,000 messages sent during the war by Soviet operatives to officials in Moscow. These messages were so highly classified that they were inadmissable as evidence in court cases pursued against accused spies during the early Cold War; successful convictions relied instead on less direct evidence from other sources, confessions, or the credibility to judges or juries of those making accusations of espionage.17

The discovery of Venona and the implication of Soviet spies more generally in the transmission of‘secrets’ from the West to the Soviet Union has contributed to a triumphalist conservative interpretation of the Cold War. Here is proofpositive, some historians have seemed to say, that the Russians were up to no good, that their own nuclear program was nothing without a supply of information from more advanced programs, that they stole and cheated their way to nuclear parity with the United States during the Cold War, as if confirming their general duplicitousness, untrustworthiness, and capacity for serious misbehavior. Each new disclosure about atomic spies, fully substantiated or not, was greeted with a kind of knowing sneer; driving spies out of history’s woodwork became an occasion for gleeful bashing of ‘revisionist’ historians who had dared to imagine more nuanced or numerous causes of the Cold War than Soviet perfidy alone. This tendency was abetted, though perhaps unwittingly, by the term used to describe the acquisition of nuclear weapons by more and more nations after 1945: proliferation. That is a biological, even botanical word, which means reproducing ‘by multiplying new parts’, as in budding.