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themselves that they were not in mortal danger from an American bomb. After his bizarre repartee with Byrnes at London in September 1945, Molotov met the secretary again, in Moscow in December. Also present at this meeting was James Conant, determined to get a reading of the Soviet attitude toward the bomb. Incredibly, Molotov repeated his performance of three months before, this time asking Conant (the American recorded) ‘if I had an atomic bomb in my pocket’, and joking, in a Christmas Eve toast, that Conant should reveal the bomb he had no doubt stashed in his ‘waist-coat pocket’. Stalin interrupted Molotov. The bomb, he said sternly, was ‘too serious a matter to joke about’. ‘We must work together’, he added, ‘to see that this great invention is used for peaceful ends.’ After dinner, Conant walked over to Stalin to say good night. Stalin offered ‘heartiest congratulations to the American scientists for their accomplishment’ and repeated his hope that the bomb would inspire world peace. And, he admitted, Russia was currently ‘behind in science’. The following September, Stalin told the British Sunday Times correspondent Alexander Werth that atomic bombs ‘cannot decide the outcome of a war, since atomic bombs are quite insufficient for that’.36

Stalin was right about this. The American military, which began devising plans for a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, realized that a bomb dropped on Moscow and other cities would leave the Red Army, intact and angry, in Europe, while bombing the Red Army could have disastrous consequences for the innocent people living nearby. Yet the strategic conundrum the Americans faced, possibly understood by Stalin, was hardly enough to curtail the urgency of his pursuit of his own bomb. If he did not claim, with some American planners (like Baruch), that the bomb would be the ‘winning weapon’ in the Cold War, he nevertheless felt that the US monopoly had damaged the balance of power between the two sides. As long as the Soviets believed the Americans might use it against them as they had against the Japanese, the bomb was a diplomatic tool of considerable force. Or so Stalin evidently told Kurchatov and Commissar Boris Vannikov in mid-August 1945: ‘Hiroshima [he said] has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed.’ Stalin found confirmation for his fears as the Cold War unfolded. The Americans he viewed as moderates— Harry Hopkins, Stimson, Wallace—were shunted aside in Washington. Churchill threatened, Byrnes swaggered, and Truman seemed to endorse them both. The Americans refused to provide, on reasonable terms, a loan to the Soviets. They made clear, by the fall of 1946, their intention to keep Germany divided and to restore to prominence the western half of it. They would not discuss making the Dardanelles as accessible to the Russians as the Suez was to the British or Panama to themselves, and when he contrived to see Stalin’s hand at the back of a communist insurgency in Greece, Truman responded, in March 1947, by dividing the world into two ideological camps and requesting economic and military assistance for Turkey and Greece, two nations much closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States. Three months later the Americans announced a clever plan of aid for all of Europe and the Soviet Union, one containing a poison pill requiring Soviet economic transparency and that Moscow donate rather than receive funds. And, above all, there was Baruch’s grotesque charade, performed to mask the essential truth that the Americans had no intention of sharing the atomic bomb. So thought the Soviets.37

And it rankled. More than anything else, the atomic bomb had become a symbol: of American prowess and power, but also of great power status, of scientific status (‘we have to learn five times, ten times more than we need to know today,’ Khariton told his group at Sarov in 1947), of ideological fitness and bureaucratic efficiency—even of male potency, for, while Soviet scientists called their experimental plutonium reactor ‘Annushka’, they called the test shot itself‘Stalin