IngentaConnect 3. Stalin and the Nuclear Age

Author: Zubok, Vladislav M.

Source: Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, April 1999 , pp. 39-62(24)

Publisher: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs

Abstract:

Stalin understood the military and political significance of atomic weapons and directed all available Soviet resources to obtaining this weapon. However, he remained largely a statesman operating on the premises and experience of the pre-nuclear age. For him, the emergence of atomic weapons made the prospect of a future war more terrifying, but no less likely. America's atomic monopoly in the first phase of the Cold War did not play a substantial role in deterring Stalin. He was determined to defend his spheres of influence and to dispel any sign of possible Soviet weakness in the face of America's atomic saber rattling. Stalin, a genius of state terror, power broking, and war diplomacy, was different from statesmen in the democratic countries, but his outlook on world politics was consistent with the realpolitik of the pre-nuclear age. He had as much inclination as some of his ’liberal’ Western counterparts to regard nuclear power as a means of augmenting military power and, in larger terms, the power of the state.

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