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
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
I hate to quote reddit but this post on r/askhistorian answered by Alex Wellerstein, a historian who wrote a book on the US nuclear secrecy, had a detailed answer:
At the same time, those scientists didn't know that and still risked everything to ensure the soviets got their information.
100%
you're making some argument about whether or not it was a benefit reducing time to completion, I am saying it is a benefit because that is literally how science works
that's called peer review dawg, which you can't do with nothing to review
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
The list of people who comprised Special Committee No. 1 (Atomic Weapons) formed on 20 August 1945:
Together with Special Committee No. 2 (Reactive Technologies) and No. 3 (Radar Council) were the three Special Committees formed under Stalin immediately after the war to achieve fundamental breakthrough in new weapon technologies.
I'll have to reexamine where I heard my stuff, I may have just confused Molotov with Malenkov.
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).
Not by that much. Quote from Boris Chertok’s Rockets and People, Vol. 1:
But you are correct in that not prioritizing them was the right move. The Soviets prioritized on solid fuel rockets and the result was the Katyushas that wreaked havoc on the German army. Focusing on developing V-2 like rockets would have been useless fighting against Nazi Germany.