Whistling in the Dark

The sixth chapter discusses the reasons the United States Government did not consider the Soviet atomic bomb program an immediate national security threat. In contrast to their beliefs about German science, many American scientists and some within the civilian and military leadership regarded Soviet science as institutionally backward, and many of its scientists as intellectual inferiors. Other key players in American leadership, including Leslie Groves, argued that the Soviet Union did not have the industrial capabilities to manufacture an atomic bomb in less than 20 years. Regardless of the reasoning (whether it was an indictment of Soviet science, Soviet industry, or the Soviet system), the people in the positions of power in the United States almost universally assumed they had time to build an effective atomic intelligence system, and do so before the Soviets made much of that system obsolete.