The Cold War is basically the USA in a power trip taking the world for hostage while they have the monopoly on nukes
The Cold War is basically the USA in a power trip taking the world for hostage while they have the monopoly on nukes
I nominate Nikita Krushchev to be the most important figure in the cold war, literally playing 3d chess with a bloodthirsty imperialistic regime and preventing nuclear war.
Commenting on Kennedy’s government giving the OK to launch the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba:
“ If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”
-the man himself
All the spies who gave information on nuclear weapons to the Soviets were unsung heroes. Just imagine what that whole period would've been like with an extremely aggressive
if the USSR hadn't developed nukes as soon as possible.America as the sole nuclear power.. there would have been a lot more usage of nuclear arms.
Afaik the Cold War was really a war between air force generals who wanted to kill every human being on the planet and slightly less monstrous Americans who thought that inciting a nuclear war would be a bad thing.
A world where the bourgeoisie are the sole owners of nuclear power. I can only imagine.
The Soviets didn’t need nor did they really benefited from the leaked intelligence.
Beria who oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project (ENORMOZ) was too paranoid that he used the intelligence and played it off as “hey, we got some data here from the other institutes, can you check for us and see if they’re correct?”
Essentially, just to double check for confirmation, but the Soviets were already on the right track and they would have gotten the bomb without delay, with or without the leaked intelligence.
Sometimes people underestimated the Soviet Union. They pretty much started the space program from scratch (with some help from German scientists from adjacent fields) while the Americans got the full package of the Nazi V-2 team, the entire leadership, intact rockets, full documentation, launch vehicles and entire support crew, and still lost to the Soviet Union in launching the world’s first ICBM.
Fucking hilarious code name
Having data to cross reference is a big deal idk how you could actually believe that's not a benefit
Just want to add that Russian rocket experimentation actually predates the Soviet Union by a decade or so. IMO if the Soviets had prioritized them, they could have had V2-sized rockets before the Germans (but not prioritizing them was the right move, considering how useless the V2s ended up being in the grand scheme of things).
I thought Molotov was entrusted to oversee the R&D of the Soviet Nuclear project, or at least I remember reading that in his memoir or something along those lines
Imperial Japan was getting shipments of Uranium from Germany, and they had a nuclear research base which was fully taken over by the Soviets
There's a chance that some of the technology that went into the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and by extension every subsequent arsenal except for US/Eng/France, was Japanese