Stalin did not believe that war was likely in the short term; nor, as will be seen in a later chapter, did he believe that Soviet divisions had lost their value. The immediate threat he saw was not military, but the threat of atomic diplomacy. He was afraid, as he had explained to Gromyko and Gusev, that the United States would try to use its atomic monopoly to impose a postwar settlement. This raises an interesting analytical question. How could the atomic bomb affect the balance of power when the United States, as Stalin knew, did not possess a real atomic capability? The United States had a
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