A few weeks later, George F. Kennan, one of the State Department’s Soviet experts, gave his opinion in a telegram from Moscow, where he was posted at the U.S. embassy. “There is nothing—I repeat nothing,” Kennan wrote, “in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this [atomic] power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.”
