By striving to keep their Soviet ally in the dark about the Manhattan Project—knowledge the Soviets were surreptitiously gleaning on their own—the Americans and British were also stoking the suspicions of their ally as to their ultimate intentions, and the longer this failed secrecy was maintained, the deeper those suspicions became. At the same time, the Soviets couldn’t protest their exclusion from the atomic club, because that would tip the Americans and British to the fact that they had already penetrated their wall of secrecy through spying.
