He had numerous Soviet sympathizers in his initial team and plenty of research went out the back door. Stalin wasn’t going to get the bomb first, because he didn’t have a inflation-adjusted $5B to throw at nuclear research in the midst of a full court press against Germany’s Eastern Front. But Soviets were more than happy to gobble up German scientists in their own variant of Operation Paperclip. They got advances in industrial and aerospace technologies faster than the Americans as soon as that peace dividend started to accrue. And they got to the hydrogen bomb before the Americans, to boot.

One of the bigger tragedies of the Soviet Era was the failure of Khrushchev and Brezhnev to convert those early post-war gains into the kind of quality of life improves that would make Warsaw Pact lifestyle and culture more attractive than the western bloc. Everything from cellular phone service to modern aviation was within their reach, but they fumbled the bag. In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed in the face of a cheap pizza chain, not the two year gap between first generation nuclear bombs.