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“Five would be enough to crush defenses and disrupt communications and transportation, not to mention the destruction of major cities,” Ustinov explained. His tone, Sergei Khrushchev remembered, “did not allow for even a shadow of a doubt.”

“Terrible,” said Khrushchev, trailing off in thought. Five flicks of a switch to break the will of a nation like Britain. Astonishing. Cost-effective, too.

• • •

It was not only the search for a new weapon to counter American air superiority that had brought Khrushchev to Korolev’s design bureau. He was also looking for ways to save money because, unlike the booming American economy, Soviet central planning was in trouble. The years of rapid growth after the war, when entire cities and industries had been rebuilt from rubble, were over by the mid-1950s. Most Western European nations had made remarkable recoveries by then, due in part to the Marshall Plan. But the command economies of the Eastern bloc had spurned American financial aid and were now beginning to suffer from a crisis of inefficiency. Put simply, Soviet central planning was suffering from the law of diminishing returns. No matter how many rubles the Russians sank into their wobbly industries, they were getting a smaller and smaller return on their investment. And the problem was only going to get worse over time.

For Khrushchev, the economic slowdown came just as his treasury faced the twin challenge of meeting the raised American threat and rising consumer demands at home. After years of sacrifice, first during the war and then during reconstruction, Soviet citizens were beginning to yearn for a higher standard of living. Encouraged in part by a slew of lighthearted films and musicals after Stalin’s death that featured fashionable clothes, fast cars, and the joys of shopping, Soviet citizens had embraced this new material slant on life. Khrushchev had approved the cinematic thaw and the departure from the austere militarist offerings of Stalinist directors because he understood that he could not rule by fear alone. Stalin had shrewdly substituted a diet of national pride and terror for material well-being that had given his subjects comfort in the notion that while they were frightened and poor, they were building a great empire and a better tomorrow. Khrushchev preferred the carrot to Stalin’s stick. Parades were not enough. People had to have tangible rewards from the socialist miracle touted by the new propaganda films.

To bring his movies more in line with reality, Khrushchev needed to free up hundreds of billions of rubles to pay for housing projects, to recapitalize decrepit automobile factories, and to finance agricultural reforms that would put food on people’s tables. As things stood, the Soviet Union could barely feed itself. Yields were so low that in 1953 per capita grain production had fallen to 1913 levels. All told, the USSR’s muddy collective farms were producing less food in the early 1950s than they had in 1940. If the trend continued, the Soviet Union would starve.

To reverse the decline, Khrushchev had embarked on a hugely ambitious and controversial program to develop 80 million acres of virgin steppe in central Asia that was intended to increase agricultural production by 50 percent. Molotov, in particular, had vehemently opposed the plan, which required relocating three hundred thousand farmworkers and fifty thousand tractors to cultivate the raw fields in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia. It was far too expensive, Molotov argued, and the climate was too harsh. But Khrushchev had overruled him; the money, he said, would be found somewhere, trimmed from the fat of various other budget allocations.

Military expenditures ate up between 14 and 20 percent of the Soviet economy, compared to 9 percent for the United States, whose economy was much larger. And yet, despite the large outlays, the Soviet armed forces could not adequately address the new American jet-bomber threat. The Red Army had more than 3.5 million men under arms, but they were useless against B-47s carrying